Product Details

• Actors: Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau
• Directors: Theo Angelopoulos
• Language: Greek
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Region: Region 2 (Read more about DVD formats.)
• Number of discs: 1
• Run Time: 136 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000E2HCGE
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,042 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "If I take one more step, I'm "elsewhere,"... or I die.", December 19, 2006

By 

Tintin "tintin75" (Winchester, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Suspended Step of the Stork [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Spain ] (DVD)

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... Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, September 1, 2010

By 

Cosmoetica "cosmoeticadotcom" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Suspended Step of the Stork [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Spain ] (DVD)

The screenplay was co-written by Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos, and Petros Markaris, and the stylistic influence of Guerra, as usual, reigns supreme, and fortunately so. The music, by Angelopoulos' long time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou, is, as usual, superb. While Angelopoulos films do not use music as innovatively as Werner Herzog's films, nor as pop culturally as Martin Scorsese's films, few films marry image and emotion with sound and well. That stated. Few filmmakers can use the absence of sound as effectively, either. And, of course, there is the Angelopoulos long take, provided by cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos. Whereas the long takes of an Antonioni are wrought with tension, and those of a Bela Tarr are often elliptical in space and feeling, Angelopoulos's are purely emotional, and often use symbolism. A good example of this comes in the final scene, after the reporter is done with the refugee, the town, the border, and the colonel. He walks along the river, past telephone workers garbed in yellow raincoats, as they ascend poles. There seem to be a couple dozen of the workers, yet few move. It is as if they are ancient stylites looking out over the rift that they can do nothing to heal. In fact, their very muteness and lack of motion make them even more impotent; as if guidons to some cause that simply is, but cannot affect, or musical notations sans sound. And this is reflected in the very real frustration portrayed by the reporter (and the actor who portrays him, Gregory Karr). Another scene is a long tracking shot of boxcars where the Albanian refugees live. An accordion plays a folk song, and as the camera tracks it feels as if the hapless people are moving (and the deliberate iconography of the World War Two Nazi railroads to death camps lends a sense of hopelessness to their plight). Except, it is an illusion of motion, as the refugees are stuck in their plights, each boxcar with its own slack-jawed prisoners mutely gazing out at the cosmos. The riverside wedding scene, also done virtually wordlessly, is another example of Angelopoulos's mastery of cinema, and is a key scene, for similar riverside scenes figure prominently in his earlier Landscape In The Mist and later Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow. The scenes in these films are so similar that one almost feels they are prefigurations, or connecting devices between the films, as if the Angelopoulos canon is one extended, ongoing film, not separate works of art. The acting, done from a distance, and using the whole body, still conveys powerful emotions, and is lacking any musical score- only the sounds of nature (the wind, river, etc.) abound. I cannot recall any Hollywood film that would do such a thing- cast big name stars like Mastroianni and Moreau, and then not take `advantage' (in the traditional sense) of their `star power.' But it works, nonetheless, for this is a film that is so well wrought that, in essence, any actors could have stepped in and done a good job (recall my claim of being on autopilot; but in the best sense), for the lack of emoting via facial expressions, and the deliberate interchangeability of characters and actors is another element of the film that aids its universality.

But, above all, all of these techniques are simply variations on the obliquity of moment I mentioned earlier. A seemingly familiar scene is set, but then plays out slightly differently than expected. We visually are comforted, but the disjunction between the expected and the result lingers subconsciously, provoking a rewatch of the film, at most, and a desire to understand, minimally. A final example comes in a scene midway through the film, and one that is an astonishing long take. After some ethnic tensions in the town, between refugees, a man's body is found hanged, dangling from the end of a crane. The colonel shows this to the reporter, and then orders the cadaver lowered to the tracks. As it slowly descends, we see women in babushkas wailing in the background. They run toward the figure, and we think that they are wailing for it. As the body comes to earth, the camera leaves the scene, and follows the reporter, as a train pulls in slightly farther down the tracks. He is there to greet the Greek politician's wife, before she is to `confront' the Albanian refugee. The camera follows him, turns 180° degrees, then before following him through one side of the train and out the other, we glimpse the pack of babushkas swarming on the corpse. It seems like they are predators on carrion, stripping it of possessions. What we thought was a scene of grief seems to have devolved into a scene of rapacity. But, this is all `minor,' for the camera is more interested in the reporter and his quest. Still, that the camera never breaks away from the reporter, and all this plays out in the background, is a virtuoso achievement in technical, emotional, and narrative terms.

Even the film's title, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, is oblique. Yes, there is the obvious reference to the way the colonel and reporter both hold their legs up over the border line, but it can also be referring to the suspended life of the Greek politician- a man whose life seemed a thing of beauty and hope for the Greeks, yet is frozen in the diegetic history of the film- or not?, if one believes that the refugee really was the politician. Fortunately, such a freeze does not affect the viewer, for The Suspended Step Of The Stork is a masterpiece of a film. True, many video game style Hollywood action and adventure film addicts will not `get it,' but who really gives a damn what such folk think? They are the unobliqued in life, and this film shows how little such really matters, in the long run or short.