FROM THE ARCHIVES (11/15/20): FRANCESCO ROSI'S CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (1979)

 

I’m currently 64 years old, and though I still have an alarming collection of blind spots in my experience,  I have seen a lot of movies in just over 23,000 spent days. But back in November 2020, on a quiet Saturday night, I erased one of those blind spots and replaced it with a vision of clarity that was, to me, quite unexpected. 

Around 8:45 p.m. I started looking at the new Criterion Blu-ray of the uncut, original four-part, four-hour presentation of Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), based on Carlo Levi’s memoir of his political exile in a remote village in pre-WWII Southern Italy, a time defined and scarred by Mussolini and that fascist regime’s  attempt to impose a new colonial presence in Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia. It had been a long day the day before, and by the evening I was plenty tired— I figured I’d just dip into the disc and take a look at how it looked, with no expectation of actually watching it, and certainly not getting any further than an hour or so before drifting into unconsciousness.

But the alchemy of the movies is a mysterious thing. From the opening images of Gian Maria Volontè as Levi, bearded, solemn, in repose and surrounded by a multitude of paintings of his own creation, to the title card “1935” imposed over a shot of a train which bears Levi to the town of Galiano, in the province of Lucania on Italy’s southern bootheel, to the slow revealing of a culture in the impoverished Galiano, people, traditions, customs and superstitions left behind in the wake of the rest of the country’s economic development and relentless political oppression, the movie’s patient gaze, its nonjudgmental approach to its characters and their environment is established immediately. 

As Levi is introduced to the various people who will expand and enrich his own dissent from the fascist establishment that has made him (and a few others in the town with whom he is not allowed to speak) a political prisoner, I found myself succumbing to its rhythms and knew after 10 or 15 minutes that I was in for the long haul. But it was hardly a chore. It is a rare thing, but that Saturday night in November 2020 I felt myself succumbing to what Rosi wanted to show me, and the way he wanted to show it, in a particular fashion that I can’t recall experiencing often in other films. There was a distinct sensation of my mind and body sinking into the imagery which, on this spectacular new Blu-ray, has a clarity and richness that promises the sort of seduction few movies are capable of fulfilling. 

I spent four hours seeing the world of these Italian peasants, who for Mussolini and his enforcers existed simply as subjects and fodder for war, through Levi’s (and Rosi’s) eyes, feeling my way toward an understanding that would, like it would for Levi, I suspect, remain just out of reach while also changing his life forever. In my own way, I feel like seeing Christ Stopped at Eboli has been a life-changing experience, one that contained within it the possibility of a genuine expansion of perspective, of yielding to a way of seeing the world that already, just 12 hours later, felt like it was in there tinkering with my synapses, becoming an essential part of the blood flowing through my veins. The movie, a giant vision of humanity, began expanding inside my head that night, and four years later I’m beginning to reflect on the ways it had seemingly helped equip me for the new reality America and the world are facing in 2024.

At 60 years old I certainly didn’t expect, sitting by myself on a quiet Saturday night, to discover a relatively less-well-known film that deserves consideration as one of the greatest I’ve ever seen. But that’s what happened. Christ Stopped at Eboli is surely a landmark in this old man’s continuing experience of education about life and the movies, and I cannot wait to see it again. And now, at age 64, that time may be coming again very soon indeed.

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