Le Pas suspendu de la cicogne

A YOUNG REPORTER ARRIVES AT THE greek border where he finds a city, a face and an image. The city is the End of the world, ''the waiting room'' popularly called, a place everyone longs to get out of. Refugees of different nationalities manage to get across the border and gather in ghettos. All dream of a new life somewhere else. The face belongs to an older refugee, looking remarkably much alike a greek politician who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, for obscure reasons. The image shows how a man approaches the border on the bridge that separate nations. A blue line marks where Greece ends, a white where no-man's land begin and a red mark the crossing to foreign land. The man lifts his foot to step across the border, but his movement is arrested mid-air - like a stork's lifted leg - for a couple of moments: ''If I take a step, I will be ... somewhere else ... or die.'' Angelopoulos unites his views of time and place in strangely beautiful images with the current historical-political situation. Like thirty years ago in Antonioni's Night, the film has some excellent acting by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. _
Comment:
THE 20TH CENTURY IS COMING TO AN END, and all expectations, born at the beginning, have been ruined. No one has anything new to offer today. But the soul is a bird with a lifted leg: to take the step or not? To direct a film is a kind of mental searching: you make an effort to understand, like Mastroianni's character in the film. It seems to me that melancholy weighs heavy on our world these days. In the beginning the reporter's motives are superficial. He is after a scoop, a career opportunity, but that doesn't help him figure out the mystery around the politician. When he finally gives up, he's found himself.
The Suspended Stride of the Stork gathers a great number of the questions that occupy me and brings about a new theme: the city, crowded by refugees. Thc borderland in Landscape in the Mist was a fairy-tale like experience for the children. In my new film crossing the border describes the idea of a dividing line that cuts off love relations and interrupts the contact between people, separates languages, people and religions: a dividing line that prevents people from communicating. I don't know exactly how it happened that I started to think about these themes, I can't trace the source. It was probably a question of intuition. As the work on the film progressed, the theme was mirrored with increasing clarity in contemporary events.'' _
THEO ANGELOPOULOS