By Matthew Scarince
“Christ never came here,” writes Carlo Levi, describing the desolate village of Gagliano in the hinterlands of southern Italy to which he was exiled in 1935. “Christ stopped along the coast, at Eboli.” Internal exile is a strange concept in the digital age. For a generation raised with the global reach of the internet, to whom landscapes are defined by interstate highways and airports rather than by hills and villages, this technique of isolating a political opponent seems absurd and trivial. Francesco Rosi begins his four-part TV miniseries adaptation of Levi’s year of exile (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979) by emphasizing his isolation: though constantly escorted, Levi is alone, his light grey suit of a fashionable cut standing out against the unrelenting black clothing of the Lucanese peasants and the dark overcast sky. They are visible only in their poverty; they are, as Rosi’s contemporary and fellow director Vittorio De Seta once titled them, “the Forgotten.” And to the inhabitants of Basilicata (ancient Lucania), the doctor from Turin is a foreigner in their forgotten country.
When Rosi released the film to television audiences in 1979, Italy was at the height of the tumultuous “Years of Lead,” a period of intense political violence carried out by Marxist and Neo-Fascist militias—arguably the only lasting cultural legacy of the old Fascist regime. A decade earlier, writer and philosopher Augusto Del Noce sought to cut the Gordian knot of modern politics by achieving a concrete definition of the philosophy underlying Mussolini’s dictatorship. Breaking with the consensus established by Ernst Nolte, Del Noce defines Fascism not as a reactionary coup against modernity, but rather as a “stage” in the “age of secularization.” Accordingly, Mussolini’s Fascist Idealism was not a complete rejection of Marxism-Leninism but an alternative to it. The Fascist state fits directly into the paradigm of a technocratic society, against which the only defense is to regain “a genuine historical awareness.” Through Levi’s eyes, Rosi shows his audience a historical community, damaged and impoverished yet still worth preserving and even emulating. Continue reading
