Christ Stopped at Eboli: Memories of Exile

The film is in many ways about looking and observing. We start by seeing Levi’s paintings of Lucania, knowing that what will come in the film will eventually translate into those pictures. Rosi forces us to pay close attention to the faces, the dress, and the scenes of Gagliano, just as Levi would have done, so that he could continue painting them for the rest of his life. In a rather bold move, Rosi spends nearly eighteen minutes on Levi’s trip to reach the village: two train rides; one on a bus, complete with chickens; and finally one by car. This is meant not only to show us the extreme isolation of the village and its lack of connection to the outside world but also to habituate the viewer to looking, and looking though Levi’s eyes—we take in the landscape of Lucania through the windows. Rather than simply showing us the village and its inhabitants, Rosi wants to make us aware that we are seeing through a particular lens. The film’s last view of Gagliano comes through the rain-streaked window of the same car as Levi is driving off. This both serves to tie the film together and to remind us that everything we are seeing is filtered through Levi’s subjectivity and memory. As Levi does in his book, Rosi puts us into a meditative mood from the start.

Rosi is remarkably faithful to Levi’s memoir and managed to work into his film a surprisingly high percentage of the book’s scenes and characters and ideas. He made the adaptation in cooperation with the Italian state television company, RAI, as a kind of series in four hour-long parts (a shorter version was made for theatrical release). In the interest of narrative coherence and dramatic sense, Rosi sometimes stitches together scenes, conversations, or incidents that are separate in the book. For example, during Levi’s train trip to reach the village, he comes across an abandoned dog who has been left in the station with a sign around his neck giving the name Barone and asking whoever finds him to take care of him. The dog follows Levi, who ends up adopting him. The story of the dog and this sign is true, but in the book it occurs at another point. Rosi folds it into the opening both for economy and to weave a minor drama, as well as some lightness and humor, into the long, elegiac opening sequence. Similarly, Rosi combines two of the stranger scenes in the book, both involving the woman Levi employs to keep house for him in the village, Giulia. Hiring her proves unusually difficult since, in the peasant culture of Gagliano, it is strictly forbidden for a woman to be alone with a man. An exception is eventually made for Giulia because she is considered to be a witch. As Levi learns, customs regarding women and sex are simultaneously rigid and puritanical, and flexible and forgiving. Many of the men of the village have emigrated to America, leaving their young wives, often never to be heard from again. Meanwhile, the abandoned wives continue to have children—a fact of life the villagers fully accept. Giulia, played memorably by Irene Papas, is smart and vital, with a kind of feral beauty. She has had more than a dozen children after her husband left for America, most of whom died in their infancy. The two scenes from the book involve Levi taking a bath with hot water Giulia has prepared, and his painting her portrait. In the first, she insists without the least embarrassment on soaping and washing his back, commenting favorably on his body. In the second, Giulia flatly refuses to have her portrait painted on the grounds that it would take part of her soul. The book’s rendition of that latter scene, involving a violent slap, is a hard one to read and interpret. In Rosi's shrewd and sensitive merging of these two sequences, the resistance and acquiescence to the portrait painting are playful, with an erotic undertone that matches the preceding moments in the bath.

One of the story lines that gives a certain dramatic arc to the film concerns Italy’s war against Ethiopia. The invasion appears imminent when Levi arrives in Gagliano; begins officially in October 1935, in the middle of his year there; and ends with Italy’s triumphal entry into Addis Ababa in May 1936 and Mussolini’s declaration of empire, which cuts short Levi’s time in the village when he, along with many other political prisoners, is granted amnesty. Levi moves between the entirely separate worlds of the town’s small bourgeoisie—i signori—and the peasants who work the fields and do all the manual labor. The town’s small Fascist contingent is limited to its better-off citizens, while the peasants are indifferent to Mussolini’s speeches. Levi notes that they are profoundly apolitical, since they regard anything coming from Rome and the state with suspicion and fear. Levi has extensive dealings with Gagliano’s mayor, Don Luigi Magalone, who doubles as its schoolteacher and is tasked with promoting Fascism in the town. He is a complex character, as played by Paolo Bonacelli—kindly disposed toward Levi, whom he enjoys talking to as one “scholar” to another, but also a loyal Fascist who is careful to enforce the regime’s orders, including those regarding Levi. He reads all of Levi’s letters to his family back in Turin before passing them along to the official censors. At one point, he advises Levi not to send a particular letter, convinced that it will lead to the authorities’ extending his period of confinement. In discussing this, they engage in a little conversation about the nature of the Italian state. In the offending letter, Levi has written that the peasants in Gagliano are “not Fascists, nor do they belong to any other party,” because political parties represent a distant, generally hostile government that is totally alien to them. “Don’t forget,” the mayor interjects, “the Duce is in Rome.” But he continues reading from the letter, admiring its prose even as he urges Levi to destroy it.

In the world of Gagliano’s peasants, the state is present only as a taxing, interfering, and uncomprehending presence. While Levi is there, he notices the peasants slaughtering their goats because, as they explain, the state has decided to put a tax on goats as a means of protecting trees. This policy, they point out, might make sense for some parts of northern Italy, but it is a disaster for them: Lucania’s rocky, arid landscape has very few trees, while goats are among the only things standing between them and famine. Similarly nonsensical to the peasants is an initial order from authorities in Matera—the administrative seat that governs Gagliano—forbidding Levi from practicing medicine in the village. The mayor goes along with it at first, sparking a rebellion in the town—until his own daughter falls ill. Levi agrees to treat her on the condition that he be free to treat everyone else.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is, at least superficially, an unusual film in Rosi’s larger body of work. In most of his work, he is perhaps the most journalistic of Italy’s great post–World War II directors. Frequently, he would get his idea for a film from reading some piece of local news that struck him as containing a mystery or the germ of a larger and more important issue: a killing in the Naples food market, the collapse of a building, a plane crash that may or may not have been accidental. With a combination of meticulous research and full immersion in the location of his subject, Rosi would then reconstruct and recreate the world of his story in a way that managed to combine analytical rigor, civic and moral passion, and the natural feel of unrehearsed documentary. With Salvatore Giuliano (1962), for example, he decided in a brilliant intuition to write the screenplay while living in Montelepre, the Sicilian bandit Giuliano’s hometown, where many of the residents had lived through events shown in the film. He went on to cast the movie almost exclusively with local people and nonactors, giving it a powerful realism and naturalism even though it is meticulously planned.