Francesco Rosi
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli

January 2, 2023

On RaiNews, I watch a report from Matera: it appears to be a city vibrant with tourism and the sales season that has just started. However, my mind goes back to a Matera, certainly different, where twenty thousand people and animals lived together in caves, called "sassi"…

Speaking about it on TV is Gian Maria Volonté who, having reached the peak of his career, strives to make solely films that say something about the mechanisms of a society, that identify within it a shred of truth. Driven by the same passion and common activism, he has formed long-lasting partnerships with some directors, including one with Naples-born Francesco Rosi, the director who, since his high school years, has made political commitment his guiding star; and, regarding truth, to seek it with a film, he believed it was necessary to connect the origins and causes of the narrated events with the effects that result from them.

In 1979, they adapted Carlo Levi's documentary novel, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, a work relegated, along with other post-war literature, to a brief mention in school literature, but which proves timeless because the events and mechanisms described and narrated in it are the same as always.

An exceptional cast was assembled, and two versions of Cristo were filmed, one for cinema and the other for television: the latter, which I will talk about, was broadcast on Rai after the earthquake that in 1980 also hit the areas where the story takes place.

It narrates the experience lived by the Turin artist in exile in Lucania between 1934 and 1936. Even if the eyes of the narrator are those of the exiled, as the title suggests, the main subject of the work is the town of Gagliano, which lies beyond the imaginary boundary that passes through Eboli, beyond which neither Greeks, nor Romans, nor the Piedmontese have arrived over the years and, finally, according to both the writer and the inhabitants, not even Christian redemption.

Life is lived in very difficult conditions. In Gagliano, the ground gives way because there are neither trees nor rocks to hold it, so it either turns back into dust or, when it rains, the clay dissolves and becomes a torrent that sweeps away everything, the church, the houses, and the paths, leaving only despair. In these precarious and unhealthy houses, the lives of men and beasts go on under the same roof and in the same rooms, always the same.

Levi finds Gagliano in this condition. And this is how the Gaglianese feel, so desperate that they do not believe in a change because there, one cannot live, but has to go elsewhere: first, they went to America, then Naples, Rome, and finally Africa, following the ventures of the duce.

An enchanted, archaic, and mysterious world, inhabited by witches who enchant men, angels who guard the entrances, "monachicchi," the spirits of children who died unbaptized. To reach it, the journey seems very long: a train, a coach, finally a car climbing a mule track that ends in that world; to understand it, one must listen to it.

Thus, this complicated peasant world, lacking trust in those who from outside have always only taken away what had been built with so much effort, thanks to a magical alchemy, welcomes the Turin writer. The cohabitation will change both, but unexpectedly, more the artist than the Gaglianesi, who, in a short time, has the impression of always having lived there.

Levi’s dry narration is impeccably rendered in the images but emphasized by the music and the final commentary, where the poet clearly states his thinking, according to which every state is oppressive if its decisions are made thousands and thousands of kilometers away from its citizens, and therefore, if one wants to tackle the southern issue, it is necessary that citizens, in every country, can make a decision.

For this reason, more than cinema, the choice of the writer to return to Gagliano, to rest among his people, is poetic and symbolic.