Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, by Carlo Levi (1945) and Francesco Rosi (1979): memoirs of sad eyes' colours

Abstract

As a hybrid genre, the narrative of Carlo Levi is an objective account and subjective elaboration that are equalized in a literary form. Written between 1943 and 1944, the book evokes with an atmosphere of memoir the period of 1935 and 1936, the writer’s exile. The film based on the narration fragmentizes the daily life of the problematic region and highlights the truth aimed by the discourses composed in times of crises, reinforced by action and expression without provincialism and also without a compensating aristocratic pose. It is possible to see some incapacity of the film by Rosi, natural to a certain degree, to translate the synthesis of literary treatment and socio-historical reflection. For this reason it is necessary to read the adaptation as an attitude about the literary matter and the result of historical experience. The memoir character relies on the artifice that makes good use of the book’s opening, the author’s short monologue, its narrative frame. The presence of paintings materializes the questions about the absurd contained in them.