When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]