Ruled by Different Rhythms

“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.

Ideology casts a long shadow, not only over Levi’s exile but over the town of Gagliano and its inhabitants. The village’s podestà is a committed Fascist who despises the peasants placed under his power. Together with his wealthy relatives, the town’s two resident doctors, he too stands out from the peasants—not as a foreigner like Levi, but as a native who has rejected his own traditions. Ignorant of both the present sufferings of his constituents, and of their long and storied history, the Fascist leadership of the village stand not as representatives of their people but as conquerors, imposing foreign rules and regulations. While questioning him about the content of his letters home, the podestà reveals to Levi that he knows nothing of the history of his own village. As Del Noce writes “Fascism does not think of history as faithfulness but as continuous creation which is entitled to overturn everything standing in its way as it moves on.” In a vivid scene Levi happens upon an elderly herdsman butchering his only goat: the state has levied a new tax on goats, and he cannot afford to pay it. His livelihood thus destroyed, he laments that “this law may be good for Italy, but not for us here.”

The state is not the only institution which has failed Gagliano. Its doctors and its priests, the guardians of bodily and spiritual health, have also abandoned it. Don Traiella, the pastor of the village’s small church, a broken and remorseful man, reviles his parishioners, calling them “animals and not Christians.” (In the southern dialects of the Neapolitan language, the word crestiano is often used to mean “person”—not unlike the use of the word “soul” in English—further emphasizing the depersonalization.) The town’s two doctors mock the locals and refuse to treat those who will not pay, hiding behind their status as officials of the Fascist regime to shield them from criticism. In utter desperation, the people turn to the “foreign doctor” to treat their wounds and ailments, and despite an official prohibition, Levi complies. The situation worsens as war is declared against Ethiopia, and restrictions on political prisoners are tightened. Levi warns the podestà that the peasants will not trust him, that they will distrust every appeal to a nationalism that sends them off to “die for someone else’s history.” The peasants are proud of their history as rebels against Italian unification, labeled “brigands” for resisting the dissolution of the ancient Kingdom of Two Sicilies. The Fascist regime can only respond with force. “The State and the Armed Forces will always be stronger than the disorganized peasants,” the podestà darkly retorts.

But the peasants are not helpless against the overwhelming power of the state. They find recourse in their traditions, ordered, as Del Noce writes, towards the “primacy of contemplation.” Rosi shows how Levi breaks out his imposed isolation when he joins a group of returned emigrants, who bond over their shared experience in America. Together they form a kind of intentional community, built around memory and music, that is resistant to the aggressive and patronizing propaganda of nationalism. Through the traditional song “Lacreme Napulitane” they lament their struggle to preserve traditional values in their new environment. Yet America is as much their home as Lucania, and their family and connections across the sea bring the two countries into a unity greater than the power of the centralized Fascist state. Rosi also shows us the friendship formed between Levi and Don Traiella, who despite his failings uses the occasion of Christmas Mass to make a valiant stand against the lies of dictatorship by denouncing the war against the Christians of Ethiopia, instead declaring the message of Christ’s peace upon the earth. In this way, he fulfills the political role of the Church to provide a religious principle that “alone can prevent democracy from turning into an oppressive power.” Outside the church the supporters of the Fascist regime sing their anthem “Faccetta Nera” in dull and even mechanistic tones, a marked contrast to the soulful and traditional peasant melodies laced throughout the film’s score.

Rosi presents a dramatic climax to Levi’s journey in its fourth part. Enraged that the medical negligence of the village doctors has led to the death of a compatriot, the villagers perform a dramatic recreation of the event in the town square. The podestà watches silently as this half-farcical, half-dramatic retelling casts the doctors as murderers and Levi as a saint, mockery that places his petty tyranny squarely into disrepute. By offering this narrative mirror to the powers that be, the peasants reinforce the strength of the contemplative approach to political action, and the emptiness of the Fascistic cult of action. Adherence to these traditional forms of communal action overturn the process of technological secularization. This is soon followed by a striking scene in which Mussolini’s vainglorious speech announcing the end of the Ethiopian war plays over beautifully composed frames of empty fields of golden wheat, barren hills of rock and sand, and the infinity of an open sky.

Now granted amnesty after the end of the war, Levi returns to Turin, but finds himself unable to communicate with his former friends and intellectual peers, whom he believes are enslaved to a technocratic paradigm of state power. He sees their approach as paternalistic and tyrannical, blinded to the realities of the people of Lucania by an intellectual and moral superiority brought about by their performative rejection of Fascism. The peasants of Gagliano are “ruled by rhythms” of those that govern the hyper-industrialized world of Turin, with its endless violence between capitalistic and socialistic factions.

The only way to break “the vicious cycle of Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” Levi explains to his sister Luisa, is to embrace a more personalistic conception of the state, one which sees in the individual “a meeting place of relationships of every kind.” It is these personal and traditional relationships, not its capacity to wield political or technological power, which define the ability of a community to endure. Rosi masterfully shows how Levi has himself become a locus for these relationships, even as he leaves his adopted home. Surrounded by the loving farewells of all those whose lives his sacrificial actions of care and love have touched, Levi becomes for these people an icon of the Divine Physician. Rain like sorrow pours around him, but behind him the sun is shining brightly, a poignant reminder of hope present to all in this vale of tears. In his own small way, Levi has brought Christ to the people beyond Eboli.

Matthew Scarince is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher working in rural New Jersey. @MScarince