Cristo si è fermato a Eboli

"If these people in Rome have so much money to spend on war, why don't they spend it here?"

For his antifascist views, the writer and painter Carlo Levi was exiled by Mussolini in 1935 to the gorgeous but rugged and isolated stone town of Aliano in Basilicata, 90km away from Matera. At this time it was an area known for being unchanged over centuries and rather backward by people in the north, and Levi describes it as not even having been visited by Christ, who he says went no further than the train station in Eboli. In one sense religion plays a role here, with one devout landowner saying he's seen a saint at a religious site and a gravedigger saying he saw the devil on a stormy night, but in another sense, they seem to believe more in folklore, ignore the local priest, and only attend mass at holiday time.

From the beginning Levi (played by Gian Maria Volonté) encounters conservative customs and ignorant superstitions, e.g. Daughters who have to spend a year in seclusion if a brother dies (three if it's the father), a doctor who believes the women in town put menstrual blood in "love potions," and the woman whose house he's staying in believing her husband died because a peasant witch put an "evil eye" on him before giving him a deadly magic potion. Eventually Levi takes his own place and hires a maid (Irene Papas) who expresses the peasants' belief that a rainbow causes a certain disease, trash can't be thrown out at night lest it hit the angel that guards the house until daybreak, and that the spirits of the unbaptized can reveal locations of treasure to people in dreams.

Despite being in the middle of nowhere, Levi came to appreciate the hard lives the poor peasants led and saw the injustice of them being ruled from afar by the government to the north, practically a separate Italy, leaving them not represented well at all. They were largely forgotten by the rest of the country until it came time to extract something out of them, e.g. Money for taxes, or young men for war. An example of a new law is higher taxes on goats because they're believed to be bad for farming in the north, but this is terrible for the peasants in this south who depend on them and now feel they have to kill them (beware, there is a butchering scene during this segment, as well as a graphic pig castration scene later). Meanwhile, a cranky tax collector is bitter over how the locals treat him, but who can blame them when he describes his job as taking whatever they have to collect what they owe - a goat, rabbit, wheel of cheese, or bottle of olive oil.

As a warning, this is not a plot-heavy story, and Levi soon settles into the sleepy rhythms of the town, among other things wandering about and watching the kids up to various mischief, like harassing a goat by hitting it with a stick while riding it, or throwing rocks at the local priest. One day Levi lies in a freshly dug grave to beat the heat, and in general he spends time painting and reading the books he can get his hands on. His copy of a book by Montaigne is confiscated by the town mayor as it's in French and deemed "dangerous." The mayor gives a speech to the townsfolk where attendance is mandatory and he extols the virtues of Mussolini invading Abyssinia. He says "The Roman legions once ruled the world. Rome's renewed greatest shines on its seven hills!" to which Levi says privately to himself, "...Shines on the seven hills. But here the hills crumble and turn to dust."

There are some in the town who have escaped their hard life by going to America, but as they're separated from family many of them return. One has a photo of FDR on his wall and is listening to aviator Francesco de Pinedo on a phonograph when Levi meets him (Pinedo was a pioneering Italian aviator who had died in a crash just a couple of years earlier). In another scene there is a rousing folk song performed, one reminding me of Portuguese fado, expressing the bittersweet feelings of being separated from loved ones by going to America.

Levi toes the line in not agitating with his political views, but quietly chafes when the mayor reads all his mail and finds certain correspondences objectionable. The mayor wants to believe he's an educated man like Levi and to talk to him like a fellow intellectual, and their discussions were among the most interesting scenes in the film for me. It's notable that the mayor excuses himself from enlisting in the invasion against Abyssinia because of his "health issues," for isn't this usually the way with these kinds of guys? And meanwhile, Levi expresses a deeper truth, that the peasants have a fundamental distrust of all flags and wars based on history, and moreover, that they view the government as something to be endured, like an event out of nature, completely separate from them. He says:

"The State is 'the people in Rome' who have always existed and always will, like hail, landslides, drought, and malaria. For the peasants, the State is farther away than the sky, and more evil because it's always their adversary. The State is a form of fate like the wind that burns the crops, and the fever that burns the blood."

It's in these moments we get the best feeling for the dynamic between north and south, and some of the south's history, like local feelings for the brigands who surfaced after unification 75 years earlier.

The final episode was rather slow as not much new was revealed, and not much had ever developed with Papas's character. It's probably true to life that way, with Levi expressing his goodbyes to the peasants who had appreciated his doctoring, and ultimately never returning. He has a conversation with his intellectual friends in the north, however, and surprises them by saying that to the south, it wouldn't matter what type of government ruled in Rome - fascist, progressive, or communist - as long as it didn't involve the peasants directly. Even though the book was published nearly 80 years ago, this adaptation is fascinating for its window into an era, as well as a springboard into further reading on Italy's "Southern Question."

This long TV film was very influential (on my younger self) which has remained at the forefront of my memory since it was shown on the BBC over forty years ago.

Some people might find this a bit slow and there's not a lot of action. It is deliberately slow and long (3 hours) to give you a similar immerse experience to Carlo Levi himself has as he is thrusted into that strange alien world. As you'll know, it's a true story of a doctor from northern Italy exiled to a southern backwater, a place not just separated by miles from civilisation but by centuries. The film is about how this learned 20th century man copes with and leans to love the harsh medieval world he is forced to be part of. We share this journey with him, we feel we are there. It's a beautiful, thoughtful and fascinating film.

"Christ stopped at Eboli" (or in Italian "Cristo si e fermato a Eboli") is a rather hard to find movie. The theatrical release is about 2,5 hours long, but I saw the TV movie, that is nearly an hour longer.

The movie is about the banishment of narrator Carlo Levi in 1935 - 1936. Levi was a left wing intellectual and critic of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

The story is situated during the war between Italy and Abyssinia (todays Ethiopia), so before the Second World War.

In spite of the title, the movie is neither about Christ nor about Eboli.

Not about Eboli because the train station of Eboli is only a stopover in the journey of Levi to his banishment location of Grassano and Luciano, two small villages in the Southern region of Lucania (today Basilicata).

Not about Christ because in the remote villages of Grassano and Lucania the Roman Catholic faith is only a surface below which ancient pagan beliefs still lives on.

In his banishment location Levi enjoys a great deal of freedom. Mussolini is more concerned with getting rid of him in the political discourse than to punish him. At the beginning Levi is first of all an observing outsider but gradually he integrates with the local community, in no small measure thanks to his medical knowledge.

"Christ stopped at Eboli" is a film about the wealth difference between North- and South Italy. Levi encounters instances of malaria in his banishment location. Many citizens try to flee the poverty by emigrating to the United States. The "emotional distance" to New York seems almost shorter than to Rome.

But "Christ stopped at Eboli" is in particular a film about the mixture of Christianity and pagan beliefs. In many instances we see this combination in horror like movies (compare "The wicker man", 1973, Robin Hardy) but in "Christ stopped at Eboli" it is used to full effect in a social drama.

The film is above all a slow movie, in the good sense of the word. The central theme is the gradual integration of he main character in the local community, "gradual" being the essential word in this sentence.

Francesco Rosi is not a very well known director. He is of the same generation as the more popular Taviani brothers. "Christ stopped at Eboli" has also some resemblance with some Taviani movies, situated as it is in the poor South. I am thinking of "Padre Padrone" (1977) in particular. Compared with "Christ stopped at Eboli" "Padre Padrone" is however nearly an action movie.

The transposition of Levi's autobiographical novel can recreate with effectiveness the atmosphere of absolute immobilism out of the history on which the novel really insists. Basilicata's and Southern Italy's setting helps to find a place absolutely uncontaminated by the modernity and the recent history. We wear the dresses of main character that works as a modern sonde in an anti-modern world: in this dimension we see all the contradictions of fascist Italy (of Italy tout court), divided by languages and geographies, where fight the fascism's rhetoric paroxysm against a world deaf to every modern rhythm. The farmer's world is a world based on the slow and circular rhythm of the nature, still impregnated with the sense of the superstitious of the events and of a mythology more ingrained than every fascist super-action.

The sedate interpretation of Volonté contributes to the assumption of a point of view curious, sensible, that can find the deep reasons of the presence of two (or more) Italies and reveal so easy and silent abuses that the potestà and others can carry on on farmers' shoulder. But the main strength of the movie is in a luminous and montalian photography, in a sensual and no overload pittoricism that makes a chromatic and geometric spectacle every single frame.

I have seen this TV film several times after reading Carlo Levi's book and having been to the Basilicata area in which Levi was exiled.

I consider the film to represent the book's aims which is to show the oppressed state of the peasants in Basilicata, the remoteness and lack of care of central government in Rome and the way in which the fascists could control the local area with very limited support - but of the people who mattered, the mayor, doctor, police. The rest of the populace could be, and were ignored.

A brief nitpicking comment on the title. It comes from something the priest said - on the lines that Christ never reached Aliano but stopped at Eboli some 150 miles distant. Eboli plays no part in Levi's book and the start of the film is wrong in showing him changing trains there, and picking up the stray dog. To get to Matera, where he started his exile he changed in Bari and would not have gone anywhere near Eboli.