Cristo si è fermato a Eboli

Christ Stopped at Eboli is a captivating film experience (or do we call it a series given its in 4 parts on ah let's not split Southern Italian hairs, shall we now), mostly for how it raises so many ideas and has the time to explore them, though it is so episodic and gradually moving in many ways that it's sort of disappointing that one doesn't connect so much on any kind of emotional level to the men and women and occasional children that Carlo Levi meets and grows closer to and helps as a doctor (and sometimes cannot) over his year in exile as an anti-fascist in 1935 Italy.

There is one conversation that Carlo and the Mayor of this village near Eboli (hence the title), though this mayor speaking tries to do so not as the Mayor vut as a friend, and which stems from a letter Carlo was intending to send out from town to a female friend up North. The letter is telling about how he sees the peasants and townsfolk as not really being this or that but are there own people, and the Mayor Luigi gently but firmly says this isn't so and that the peasants just want more land (and tries to argue that conquering other lands like Italy tried to do in Africa) will accomplish that, and there are other ideas bounced back and forth between the men.

It's possibly one of the times in the film where there's a sense of conflict, and that it is all over the ideas presented - about who the peasants claim to be or who they are and how Fascist ideology spreads and is easy to detect but difficult to eradicate (you can see it right here in America right now, this is where I'd usually say I digress but no, this is a key point), and that one has to really rethink what 'The State' may be as an entity, and if it has to be rethought and changed entirely, to address so many issues that come about with like Nationalism and Pride and that feeling some who have almost nothing that if they, say, go off and fight in a war and come back as a hero it's worth it even at the risk of death, or that othering others and closing ranks with their own is so natural as breathing air, that's what may need to be done.

I may also be including in these observations what Carlo himself comes to understand by the time he's home years later and is talking with other intellectuals who think it's more cut and dry. I really was engaged with these scenes and any time really that Rosi and his writers were having people talk about such things- whether they were these exact conversations in reality or Levi was simplifying things for his book and by proxy the film, I'm pretty sure is the case but can't say for sure- and they are when I leaned forward most to pay attention to the film. I only wish much of the rest of the story/stories, at least for me, engaged me a little more emotionally speaking.

This isn't to say there aren't a couple of characters who have an impact, or at least impress upon Carlo just what life is like in the village: the mother who Carlo stays with (and says she's had 17 pregnancies, and she is really mother and father to all of her children since no one has stayed or have gone to America) and the one Priest who can't seem to reach anyone in the village (they decisively call him a drunk, though is it because they're such crappy people he drinks, one wonders) who Carlo also connects with somewhat, are two such examples. Other times there are some charming and interesting scenes where characters speak on their superstitions and other such issues, and there are some gorgeous shots of the landscapes and scenery (one should say it's due to the skill with finding the right light and tones for DP De Santis that it is so, not just what it is) and the musical score by Piccioni is lovely.

While Carlo does become certainly by episode 4 so emeshed in the community (it helps he has a pretty good track record as a non-practicing but well-learned doctor in a place where the only other medical help sucks, leave to being the Luke Wilson in Idiocracy effect one supposes, now I do digress), it doesn't mean we get a sense that Carlo has grown close particularly with any one person really. This has a pretty terrific reputation, so I looked at some of the less charitable reviews of the film and, putting aside the "it's boring" takes which don't help much, it did ring perhaps more true than not for me that the film does stand at a place (and I don't know if this is the case with the book since that's another medium altogether) where it is at an intellectual high ground, in other words the sort of peasants this is about... would they sit and watch a film like Christ Stopped at Eboli, or is it for us cineastes and art-house film buffs to sit and chew over?

I think Christ Stopped at Eboli benefits most of all if nothing else from being (I hate this coopted dumb phrase but I'll use it anyway) fair and balanced look at how someone who has his own ideas about society and fascism and anti-fasicsm is ironically put into instead of a prison and exile situation where he has to see how "they" live. I think after years of like the NY Times style pieces of "What do the people in diners *really* think" when it comes to looking at "them" and political leaders which are often not genuine, it is good to see a work of art that does try to look at people like this simply and plainly and, through a POV actor as gifted and compelling like Volante when largely listening and observing.

I just wish I felt more shaken on a more profound level by the sense of something more... poetic, perhaps (as a useful comparison, Tree with Wooden Clogs, which I thought this might more resemble, comes to mind). It is beautiful and well made, and yet it is like going to and having a really gigantic mutli-course meal at a restaurant, you'll remember to leave a nice tip and a good rating online, but will one come back to it? Hmm. 7.5/10.

This dutiful, detailed three-and-a-half TV epic describes the exile of dissident intellectual Carlo Levi in a remote village of fascist Italy, blighted by poverty, disease, immirgration and governmental contempt. The film is part-character study, part-socio-historico-political analysis, part careful representation of a people and its place. It is seriously flawed (the people are sentimentalised, the politics are simplistic, the pleasant presentation (music, major actors, cinematography etc.) works against the horrifiic subject matter); but there are nice ironies too, such as the Christlike Levi capable of the fascism he deplores.

The film can be seen in two contexts, as a neo-realist riposte to the prominent anti-realist 70s films about Fascism ('The Spider's Strategem', 'The Conformist', 'Amarcord'), and as a prestigious historical epic on a national theme frequent in the 70s and 80s ('The Travelling Players', 'Heimat'). In both cases it falls short.

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.

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.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is one of the best movies by Rossi, loyal to his tradition of neorealism. The movie depicts isolated rural-peasant life as an account of an urban intellectual – doctor, painter and a political activist who has been exiled to this remote area due to his political dissent during the Fascist rule in Italy. Not like similar movies in lenght, Crist Stopped at Eboli constantly absorbs audience, probably due to its realist description and selective representation of peasant life which is "frozen in time". The film pushes the audience to contemplate on philosophical aspects of the concept of time and it is heavily imbued with the display of social and political problems.

Rosi beautifully describes the destitute of the peasant settlers of this remote and isolated land, their ignorance and apolitical life, the deep rift between these people and state, and the irrelevance of the quasi-comic "victories" of the Il Duce to these people among many other social and political issues. Like Rosi's other movies here again neorealist representation goes along with the combination of documentary techniques and fictional context. Rosi lets the images to speak for themselves rather than the Gian Maria Volente who is in the central role in the movie.

In the movie (as it is in the book), the peasant life and urbanity are represented as two alien civilizations and antithesis of each other. These peasants have their own way of life, own customs, own aspirations and means of joy. What is going on Rome or the war in Abyssinia for "regaining the glory of the Rome" does not capture their interest. They are aware of the state through the taxes collected or men called for military service. In his letter, Levi describes the urban civilization as an antithesis of this peasant life which aspired throughout the history to "colonize" it.

The Christ Stopped at Eboli also pushes the audience to ponder on the philosophical meaning of history, its relevance nature and meaning. It describes this peasant life as "frozen in history", cut from outside life and lacking the understanding of time that we have. History as we understand is the history of "urban civilization". As peasants are alien to this civilization they are alien to this concept of time as well. In the village you stop counting days, hours as they become more and more irrelevant, there you return and base your life on the natural cycle of life which is based on seasons. In this sense the movie challenges our notion of history which is the history of the "city".

In this sense Christ Stopped at Eboli is very analogous to Y. K. Karaosmanoğlu's Yaban. Yaban is also the story of a Turkish intellectual war veteran who abandons amenities of Istanbul for the Central Anatolian village with the hope of finding his roots and alleviating the torments of his memoirs. However, to his disappointment he finds himself in an alien peasant "civilization" where he can not communicate to those people, can not be similar to them and can not understand their aspirations. What makes Yaban and Christ stopped at Eboli similar is their approach to dichotomous nature of human civilization and the concept of time. In both novels there is a representation of antagonist peasant and urban civilizations, and a relative concept of time. In both novels there is description of life which is "frozen in time" and alien to urbanity. Indeed the study of Yaban from this perspective can be insightful for the discussions of continuity and change in the History of Mediterranean, as Turkey is widely excluded from such studies. However when you read Christ stopped at Eboli and Yaban what strikes you first is the patterns of similarity in peasant life and experience of the intellectuals visiting these places. They can back both the universality of "two civilizations" argument and lounge duree approach in the Mediterranean area.