The Suspended Step of the Stork

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: German (Dolby Digital 5.1)English (Dolby Digital 2.0)Spanish (Subtitles)Synopsis: Four countries-France, Greece, Italy and Switzerland-converged upon the production of Suspended Step of Stork. The film is set on the Greek border, where a steady stream of refugees flows on a perpetual basis. Reporter Gregory Karr thinks that he's spotted a familiar face among the anonymous throngs. It is the face of Marcello Mastroianni, cast as a politician who has long been missing and assumed dead. Karr takes it upon himself to repatriate the woebegone Mastroianni, starting with a reunion between the ex-politico and his reluctant wife Jeanne Moreau. Cowritten by director Angelopoulos, Tonio Guerra and Petros Markaris, this moving contemporary drama was originally titled To Meteoro Vima Tou Pelargoli. Extras: BiographiesAlternative FootageFilmographiesScene Access Product Description

"If I take one more step, I'm "elsewhere,"... or I die."

Theodoros Angelopoulos' The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) is the first part of a trilogy consisting of Ulysses' Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998). As explained by the director, each of these films evokes in its own way "the notion of limit or frontier in the communication between human beings, in love, and in the passage from life to death." The title of the film refers to a one-legged stance from which one can either progress or retreat. The stork, the bird of travels par excellence, does not know what to do: either to dedicate itself to its own life or sacrifice itself for the lives of others. Angelopoulos asks us the question and, as the Sphinx, inflicts upon us this final enigma: we will have to solve it before we take our first step.

As with all of Angelopoulos' films, The Suspended Step of the Stork implicitly demands a close and intimate participation on the part of the viewer, a fact that has certainly contributed to the limited popularity of his work. Dialogues are sparing, with no monologues or exchanges during which the characters exteriorize their inner conflicts, doubts, or feelings. The filmmaker prefers to keep his viewers away from their own emotional responses, and instead forces them to explore and study the characters' identities for themselves. As a result, the acting is understated and implicit, as opposed to overt and explicit. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the mythical couple of Marcello Mastrioanni and Jeanne Moreau, whom Angelopoulos has reunited, thirty years after Antonioni's La Notte (1961). Ilias Logothet (the colonel), an unexpected sympathetic figure, is more than a single character, since he also fulfills the role of what in the classical Greek theater was the Chorus.

The action scenes are set between long intervals of contemplation, where the viewer is asked to become a participant, to participate as an actor, by probing his or her own psyche. As in a novel, where the drama rests entirely on the author's writing to provide a template where the reader's imagination and/or past experience flourish, Angelopoulos' drama rests within his images: his uses of the long shots, the long takes, the leisurely pacing, the sparing dialogues that have become his trademark, inviting the viewer to experience the film from his or her personal perspective. Angelopoulos uses silence to capture moments of high intensity, reverting to the non-verbal language of gestures, gazes, sounds, and music, when he believes that words can only take us so far.

The scenario was written by Angelopoulos and his old friend and close collaborator Tonino Guerra (whose filmography extends to some 100 films, including films with Antonioni, Fellini, and Tarkovsky), and the additional participation of Petros Markaris and Thanassis Valtinos. The music, by Angelopoulos' long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, provides more than just a discreet background, but becomes itself a dramatic element of the story. Giorgos Arvanitis' camera has been crucial in all of Angelopoulos' films, and The Suspended Step of the Stork is no exception. Arvanitis was assisted by Andreas Sinanos, who became the sole camera man for Angelopoulos' most recent film, The Weeping Meadow (2004). A large part of the film consists of exterior shots in subtle, subdued colors, recorded in a drab winter light. Angelopoulos presents us with an "other Greece," one far different from the Greece of the tourist brochures, with ethereal blue skies and emerald seas, drowned in an eternal sunshine. Here, the skies are covered and gray, the air is cold and misty, and the sands of the pristine beaches have been replaced by the trampled, dirty snow of the village streets. Angelopoulos' genius through Arvanitis' camera is on display throughout the film. There are many memorable, and even extraordinary, plan-sequences, as for example in the long track shot of boxcars where refugees live. A lone accordion is heard playing a nostalgia-filled tune while the camera tracks from left to right, parallel to the row of boxcars, giving an illusion of the train being in motion ... to nowhere (in the iconography of Angelopoulos' cinema, trains are vehicles of bad omens). In the door of each boxcar stands a family staring silently at us, forever waiting. There is also the unbroken wedding scene by the river that separates the betrothed couple: a powerful moment, embracing the personal, social, historical, and religious. The scene is captured in an extreme long shot, with no music but the rumbling of the river. Last but not least, there is the startling finale, with the linesmen in yellow raingear, hanging from the telephone poles like musical notes on a staff: it's Angelopoulos at his best.

The Suspended Step of the Stork is above all else a political statement aimed at the socio-political situation in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century. It is deeply concerned with the meaning of "borders," and with those who are the victims of the confusion between nations. In the "waiting room" facing the Albanian border the refugees, political or other, outcast by the rest of humanity (the "insiders," the life-as-usual), wait. They may be stuck against a political border, but unfortunately as a result, they still carry with them, and hang on, deeper ancestral borders: those of the languages, of the customs, and of the races. Although Angelopoulos' political views are well known, the film steers clear of any political discourse regarding the causes of the refugees' plights. In the process, Angelopoulos forces us to meditate on the concepts of geographical, cultural, political, and personal "borders." This is a most appropriate subject, given the present situations in Western Europe and the United States, which are being overwhelmed with illegal immigration.

Angelopoulos considers himself a historian of twentieth century Greece, and he likes to bring lessons from the Hellenic myths into his discussions. In this film, he does some border crossing himself between the Greek and Italian cultures, drawing from a combined Homeric and Dantesque tradition of Odysseus' travel. Alexander is a Telemachus, in search of a story about an aging Greek politician/Odysseus who disappeared, never to be heard of again. This political man, a brilliant orator, unexpectedly and inexplicably left the comfort of his bourgeois existence, his wife, and his brilliant career, to live anonymously in a refugee camp with the lowest of the low. He became a poet in exile, in order "[...] to be able to hear the music above the sound of the rain." The rhetorical discourse has given way to the poetic expression. He wondered how to change the world: "What are the key words we could use to make a new collective dream come true?" He took up politics, until he discovered that it was merely a career, so he turned away from it. Of course, the "politician" is not Alexander's father, but Alexander goes deeper into pursuing the "story," deeper than is usual in any of his other assignments, and the "politician" stands before him like a father figure/Odysseus. As with Homer's Telemachus, Alexander grows as a person during his odyssey, learning to go beyond his medium, becoming personally and emotionally in touch with himself and with others: "The only thing I have known is how to film other people without caring for their feelings."

Of course, it would be wrong, even detrimental, to the enjoyment of the film, to try and see in it a retelling of Homer's Odyssey in a contemporary context. Angelopoulos draws on Odysseus's travels only as structuring and thematic elements for his film. Actually, in Angelopoulos' ending, "Odysseus" is more like the Odysseus in Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno: he does not leave for Ithaca but goes on, "carrying a suitcase," continuing his voyage toward other borders and further adventures. And Alexander/Telemachus is "suspended" between returning to his home and his career, or embarking on a voyage to "somewhere else." He states as much, in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, paraphrasing few lines from Dante's Inferno: "And don't forget that the time for a voyage has come again. The wind blows your eyes far away."

Finally, although Angelopoulos is himself not a religious person, there is a Greek Orthodox religious theme introduced during the film in the form of the yellow-suited linesmen, who go around bettering things for their fellow human beings by reconnecting communications, and also of the Christ-like figure of the "politician." In the final scene, these men in yellow demonstrate once more the Byzantine iconography's influence in Angelopoulos' work. They appear like stylites, religious figures found in the Orthodox tradition, solitary and fervent men who took up their abode upon the tops of pillars, in a form of asceticism. These closing images of the yellow-clad men climbing toward the skies are in marked contrast with the opening images of the drowned refugees in the Piraeus' roiling waters.

The film ends without a resolution as to the true identity of the character played by Mastroianni. Angelopoulos does not give us any clues, and the wife's statement, "It's not him," is far from convincing and left ambiguous enough. The important question of the film is not whether he is or is not the vanished politician, but that he could be the politician. But the film still ends on an optimistic note. Whereas the wires strung from pole to pole run only along the river, and thus communications across the border are still not possible, and it remains impenetrable, we note that this final scene is taken from a point of view across the river: the camera has crossed the border, and the reverse tracking shot is inviting Alexander and the viewer to follow beyond the boundary. On this account, Angelopoulos gives us hope that somehow, some of the borders will eventually crumble.

The complete work of Theodoros Angelopoulos is FINALLY now in the process of being published on DVD, in Greece, under his personal supervision. This revue is that of a DVD of the film published by New Star. The film is in color, spoken in Greek, with Greek, English, and French subtitles. The audio is Dolby Digital 5.1, and Dolby digital surround. The format is widescreen 16:9, PAL, Region2. The film runs for 136 minutes.

This is one of Angelopoulos' great films, and I highly recommend it.

December 20, 2006

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