In this week’s issue of the Reader, I wrote at length on King Hu’s supremely entertaining The Fate of Lee Khan (which screens again tomorrow night at 6 PM), but that isn’t the only great revival screening happening at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week. On Thursday afternoon you can catch Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) in its complete, nearly four-hour version, which had never been released in the U.S. prior to this new restoration. I can’t recommend Rosi’s film highly enough. Not only is it a brilliant piece of epic storytelling, it’s an emotionally resonant account of how author Carlo Levi spent his two years of internal exile (on the grounds of antifacist activity) becoming a better human being.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs Ermanno Olmi’s 185-minute study of peasant life in turn-of-the-century Italy (1978) is rich with incident but thin on ideas—less an advance over the standard film festival peasant epic than an unusually accomplished rendition of it. The characters and situations are oppressively familiar; Olmi’s wide-eyed, wondering point of view helps to freshen them, but not enough to overcome completely the Marxist sentimentalism inherent in the concept. I found the film most successful when it left its tenant farm setting for a lovely, lyrical boat trip to the big city, the one moment of expansiveness in Olmi’s otherwise hermetic narration. Still, the film is consistently engaging and suggestive, though it never explodes into the masterpiece it’s clearly intended to be. —Dave Kehr
