The stork's floating step
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The stork's floating step |
| Original title | To meteoro vima tou pelargou |
| Country of production | France , Greece |
| original language | French , English , Greek |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 143 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Theo Angelopoulos |
| script | Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra , Petros Markaris , Thanasis Valtinos |
| production | Theo Angelopoulos, Bruno Pesery |
| music | Eleni Karaindrou |
| camera |
Giorgos Arvanitis , Andreas Sinanos |
| cut | Giannis Tsitsopoulos |
| occupation | |
| |
The Stork's Floating Step is a film by the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos from 1991 with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in the leading roles.
action
While working on a documentary about the problems on the Greek northern border (probably the border to the Yugoslav successor state of Macedonia ), a young television journalist thinks he recognizes an old man (Mastroianni) as a politician, who years ago gave an eagerly awaited parliamentary speech with an enigmatic sentence - "Sometimes you have to be silent to understand the music." - broke off, and from one moment to the next disappeared without ever reappearing. Eventually he was pronounced dead.
Back in the capital Athens he visits his former wife (Moreau) and tries to get closer to this enigmatic figure. He manages to return to the border with a small team to look for the politician (who is never named). It is not difficult for him to find the old man again who denies being the politician he is looking for, although the similarities are obvious. The old man, who leads a poor life with his family as a telecommunications technician and part-time farmer, does not turn the journalist away, but has several in-depth conversations with him, mostly on the edge of tragic, depressing episodes that take place in the winter landscape along the border river.
The first dramatic climax of the film is a wedding ceremony performed by a Greek Orthodox priest across the border river, with the bride - the old man's daughter - standing on one side and the groom on the other side of the river. The ceremony ends with warning shots from the border patrols. The young bride spends her wedding night in the arms of the journalist, who, however, only realizes much later that he was just a proxy. On the phone, the journalist persuades the politician's wife to come to him in the border town, where he arranges to meet the old man. The encounter takes place on a small harbor bridge and is secretly filmed by the television team. The old man and the woman stand opposite each other without speaking for oppressive minutes. It becomes clear that the old man is that missing politician. Nevertheless, his wife denies his former identity in front of the film team - in tacit consent with the old politician, who leads a different, truer life.
In a grandiose final chord, the young, visibly mature journalist stands at the border, lifts his foot to the symbolically indicated step over the forbidden line, whereupon the border guards on both sides attack, as in the opening scene of the film, as the commander of the border guard thus demonstrating the dangerousness of the border. Now, however, technicians - including the old man - climb a row of telegraph poles in bright yellow oilskins against a gray sky in a ballet-like manner in order to reinstall a telephone line destroyed by the storm.
interpretation
The politician, who suddenly disappears shortly before the climax of his career in order to lead a life as an “underdog” as an adoptive father of a refugee family in a barren, hostile border landscape, drastically puts the philosopher's word into practice that there is no real life in the wrong could. He radically turns away from the glamorous and unreal illusory world of capital urbanity and goes to the toughest and most unreal area of the country - to a border that is an iron curtain on which people constantly die and have to fight for daily survival, such as also about their dignity and identity. The border, the border river and the barren, cold and forbidding landscape are the main actors of equal rank in the film alongside the actors. They are concrete as well as metaphorical the boundaries between people, in the hearts and in the minds of people, the control and overcoming of which a mostly silent, tenacious and relentless struggle is fought in which people lose themselves and - sometimes - also regain themselves Find.
More in the impressive silence than in their dialogues, the two old stars of European film shine in the embodiment of people in an existential situation, which culminates in meeting each other again after years, and yet only being able to show each other the only act of love, to each other again deny. The distinction between true and false turns out to be far more difficult, as superficial everyday evaluations suggest. Despite its deeply melancholy mood, the film ends with the optimistic symbol of the journalist, who now seems to have understood the meaning of the 'border', and the workers who, with self-sacrificing effort, keep maintaining and renewing the thin, vulnerable wires that make the Being able to connect people with one another, even across their borders.
The topic of what separates is addressed several times by the example of the border river. Just like being speechless in your own language, even though it is your mother tongue. Furthermore, the reflection of water, air and earth appears as elements of the media-theoretical dimension: “An entanglement of a state in the element of air - floating - (as the flightable stork also refers to the air) with the element of the earth to which a step is taken, an element in which the stork is also at home. ”In this film, the river, the element of water, seems to be opposite to the river bank, the element of the earth.
criticism
“A cinematic masterpiece full of (cinema) magic moments and with tremendous wealth, a philosophical and political discourse about borders between countries and cultures, about the borderlines in each individual. The film explores the crossing of these lines and registers with sadness the loss of utopias. (Cinema tip from the Catholic film critic [...]) "
Awards
The film took part in the competition at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1991 , but did not receive any awards.
Web links
- The Suspended Step of the Stork in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Hedwig Wagner: The border river in Angelopoulos' imaginary topography (PDF file; 163 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Stork's Floating Step - Interpretation ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at bekay.de, accessed on November 16, 2014.
- ↑ Hedwig Wagner: The border river in Angelopoulos' imaginary topography at gradnet.de, accessed on November 16, 2014.
- ↑ The floating step of the stork. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 6, 2017 .
