The Suspended Step of the Stork – WEDDING#2

On assignment at a military outpost near the Greek-Turkish border (perhaps a documentary on the growing refugee problem, or the inhuman economic and moral conditions of the marginal communities that have developed near the border as a result of the refugees’ status in bureaucratic limbo as unwanted, non-legal residents in the country who, for humanitarian reasons, cannot be compelled to return home), Alexander’s attention is soon diverted from the project after a chance encounter with an Albanian refugee selling potatoes from a produce market on the riverbank, a handsome and distinguished-looking man (Marcello Mastroianni) who bears a striking resemblance to a well-respected statesman, social philosopher, and author who, at the height of his political and creative popularity, abandoned his beautiful, devoted French wife (Jeanne Moreau), walked away from his cabinet position, and disappeared into complete obscurity. Convinced that the refugee is, indeed, the missing statesman, Alexandre seizes an opportunity to embark on what on the surface appears to be a sensational exposé of the man’s strange plight and inscrutable transformation from national leader to marginalized figure, enlisting the aid of his abandoned wife who, despite having moved on with her life, still continues to harbor the wounds of his silence and self-imposed isolation during the final days of their marriage (a profound estrangement that loosely echoes their previous relationship in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte). However, as Alexandre continues to search for clues to the refugee’s real identity, he becomes increasingly haunted with the underlying reasons that led to the statesman’s disappearance itself, a personal quest that would be further intensified by his attraction to an enigmatic young woman (Dora Chrysikou) whose childhood sweetheart remains stranded on the other side of the border, separated by the Evros River.

The Suspended Step of the Stork – WEDDING#1

The first film of what would be loosely considered Theo Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders, The Suspended Step of the Stork opens to the tumultuous and disconnected stationary long shot of a helicopter hovering over an indistinguishable, formless, dark mass floating lifelessly in an undulating open sea that has been encircled by a small fleet of recovery boats. The voice of a journalist, Alexandre (Gregory Karr) provides a grim context to the disorienting sight, as a group of Asian stowaway asylum seekers, having been refused entry into the country by the government, chose instead to end their lives by jumping into the hostile, open waters rather than be returned to their native land. The provocative image of adriftness, alienation, and disposability, a recurring theme within Angelopoulos’ cinema that is visually anticipated in two iconic sequences in his earlier films – the disembodied sculptural hand towed by helicopter from the sea in Landscape in the Mist, and the aging couple cast out into the sea on a raft in Voyage to Cythera – in turn, serves as a prefiguration of the statelessness, refugeeism, and dispossession created by the institution (and institutionalization) of man-made borders in the film.

The Suspended Step of the Stork – #2

In examining the psychology of fugue, rootlessness, and self-erasure, Angelopoulos transforms the themes of identity and collective memory into a broader exposition on the absurdity of factionalism, sectarianism, and ethnic cleansing that have not only enabled wide-scale depopulation, migration, and displacement, but more importantly, contributed to an accelerated, selective cultural extinction and disposability (most directly, in Angelopoulos’ (then) observation of the protracted Balkan Wars following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union). Juxtaposed against the recurring image of yellow-jacketed telephone technicians installing new service lines along the desolate frontier (figuratively bringing civilization closer, even in the most remote populations), the stranded refugees’ plight presciently underscores the unwitting upshot of technology and globalism at the end of the twentieth century. It is this paradox of the information age that inevitably defines Alexandre’s unreconciled search for identity and connection in a community of faceless, invisible witnesses of a silent (and silenced) history – a perversion of social ideals that has cultivated, not the intimacy of an egalitarian, interconnected global village, but rather, a culture of exclusion enabled by the creation of artificially constructed borders (a theme of interpenetrating real and metaphysical borders that is similarly woven through Claire Denis’ film, L’Intrus), and that, in defining arbitrary bounds of privilege and entitlement, foments its own cultural genocide through systematic isolation, social stratification, marginalization, and xenophobia.

The Suspended Step of the Stork – #1

Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos is so great an artist that he can achieve a high level in his art through many assorted means. Having just watched his great 1991 film, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, I am still amazed. He has hit greatness in other films, but this film reaches it by taking ordinary life moments, slightly displacing them from the norm, then stepping back to take in how it all unfolds to build narrative and character in a film almost entirely devoid of facial close-ups. It’s a remarkable achievement, on par with the use of still images in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and the use of ultra-extended takes in Bela Tarr’s Satantango, because, like those films, it does not lack a narrative, as so many poor critics claim, it simply builds a strong narrative in a totally different way than most film does. This obliquity of moment, to coin a phrase, is used ceaselessly in this film- in fact, more so than in any of Angelopoulos’s other films that I’ve seen.

Fernando Pessoa – PazXLiberdade [comment ideea]

In ‘Toward Explaining Heteronomity’ Pessoa criticized the distinction made between three generic types or classes of poetry – epic or narrative, in which the narrator speaks in the first person, drama, in which the characters do all the talking, and lyric, uttered through the first person. „Like all well conceived classifications, this one is useful and clear; like all classifications, it is false. The genres do not separate out with essential facility, and, if we closely analyze what they are made of, we shall find that from lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect, and going right to the origins of dramatic poetry – Aeschylus, for instance – it will be nearer the truth to say that what we encounter is lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters.”

Pessoa died on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon. Throughout his life, Pessoa kept himself aloof from the literary world, but he followed keenly foreign literary movements. One of his pen friends was the English writer and occult figure Aleister Crowley, known as „the Great Beast”; their correspondence began in 1930. Crowley signed his letters „666”. In the 1910s Pessoa had practiced mediumistic writing, claiming once that his uncle, Manuel Gualdino da Cunha, had used his hand to make a signature. Many of Pessoa’s questions to the spirits dealt with his own sex life. One of them mocked him, „You masturbator! You masochist! You man without manhood!” In his library Pessoa had E.G. Stanley’s book Amativeness: The Master Passion of Life, which warned about the effects of masturbation. Although Pessoa later came into the conclusion, that his method of communication with spirits was self-deceptive, he continued to experiment with automatic writing, which was in France an important part of the Surrealist techniques.

Pessoa left behind some 25,000 unpublished text and fragments. From the 1940s, his poetry started to gain a wider audience in Portugal and later Brazil. Several of his collections have been published posthumously and translated in Spanish, French, English, German, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages. Among the most important works are POESIAS DE FERNANDO PESSOA (1942), POESIAS DE ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS (1944), POEMAS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO (1946), and ODES DE RICARDO REIS (1946).

„Quando vim a ter espenranças, já não sabia ter esperanças.
Quando vim a olhar para a vida, perdera o sentido da vida.”
(from ‘Aniveresario’)

Known above all as a poet, Pessoa also wrote short essays, several of which were briefly sketched or unfinished. His LIVRO DO DESSOSSOGEGO (The Book of Disquiet), the „factless autobiography”, written under the name Bernardo Soares, appeared for the first time in 1982, almost 50 years after the author’s death. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of prose manuscripts, written in the style of an intimate diary. Bernardo Soares is troubled by alienation and experiences of drowning: „And I, truly, I am the center that doesn’t exist except as a convention in the geometry of the abyss; I am the nothingness around which this movement spins…” Soares praises the literary magazine to which Pessoa contributes, he loves and hates his city, but cannot break out of his monotonous life.

fernando pessoa [PazXLiberdade]

Pessoa earned a modest living as a commercial translator, and wrote avant-garde reviews, especially for Orpheu, which was a forum for new aesthetic views. His articles in praise of the saudosismo (nostalgia) movement provoked polemics because of their extravagant language. Pessoa’s first book, ANTINOUS, appeared in 1918, and was followed by two other collection of poems, all written in English. It was not until 1933 that he published his first book, the slim, prize-winning MENSAGEM, in Portuguese. However, it did not attract much attention.

The bulk of Pessoa’s work appeared in literary magazines, especially in his own Athena. Before creating his literary personalities from his inner discordant voices, Pessoa had long had doubts about his own sanity. Under his own name Pessoa wrote poems that are marked by their innovative language, although he used traditional stanza and metric patterns. The poetical technique for which Pessoa has become especially noted is the use of heteronyms, or alternative literary personae, resembling the verse personae of Ezra Pound. or Søren Kierkegaard’s „characters” who actually „authored” some of his books. Pessoa’s own name means both person and persona. At the age of five or six the poet had began to address letters to an imaginary companion, named Le Chevalier de Pas.

Much of his best work Pessoa attributed later to his heteronyms, de Campos, Reis, and Caeiro, who were partly born as a prank on Mário Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), an avant-garde poet from Orpheu. Álvaro de Campos, an engineer, represents in the spirit of Walt Whitman the ecstasy of experience; he writes in free verse. Ricardo Reis is an epicurean doctor with a classical education; he writes in meters and stanzas that recall Horace. (See also Jose Saramago‘s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984.) Alberto Caeiro, who called himself a shepherd, is against all sentimentality, and writes in colloquial free verse. Caeiro had two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, who says melancholically in ‘The Tobacconist’s’ (1928): „I am nothing. / I shall always be nothing.” According to Reis, „The life of Caeiro cannot be told for there is nothing in it to tell.” Pessoa once informed that Caeiro died from tuberculosis in 1915. After meeting him on March 8, 1914, Pessoa began to write poetry. In ‘I never kept sheep’ Caeiro said: „I’ve no ambitions or desires. / My being a poet isn’t an ambition. / It’s my way of being alone.” Each persona has a distinct philosophy of life. Pessoa even created literary discussions among them.

Fernando Pessoa [poem][2]

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon. His father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was young. Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa, his mother, married the Portuguese consul in Durban in South Africa, where the family lived from 1896. During these years Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an early love for such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He also wrote his poems in English.

Pessoa was educated in Cape Town. At the age of seventeen he returned to Lisbon to continue his studies at the university. When a student strike interrupted classes, he gave up his studies, and got employment as a business correspondent. In 1919 Pessoa met Ophelia Queiroz, a nineteen years old secretary; they exchanged letters but in November 1920 Pessoa broke off with her. With his mother, and his half sister Henriquetta, he rented an apartment on the Rua Coelho de Rocha, 16, where he lived until his death. Pessoa never married. In a letter in the 1930s, he stated that sexual desires are „a hindrance to superior mental processes”. However, his own sexual orientation obsessed him.

Fernando Pessoa[poem][1]

The most celebrated Portuguese poet, who had a major role in the development of modernism in his country. Pessoa was a member of the Modernist group Orpheu; he was its greatest representative. Pessoa’s use of „heteronyms”, literary alter egos, who support and criticize each other’s works was also unconventional. During his career as a writer Pessoa was virtually unknown and he published little of his vast body of work. Most of his life Pessoa lived in a furnished room in Lisbon, where he died in obscurity.

I never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I’d done so.
My soul is like a shepherd.
It knows wind and sun
Walking hand in hand with the Seasons
Observing, and following along.
(from ‘I never kept sheep’, The Keeper of Sheep, 1914)

Cry for Bobo [UK 2001]

// <![CDATA[// CRY FOR BOBO Director: David Cairns Scotland, 2001, 9min Format: 35mm (screening) – Super 16 (shooting) Festival Edition: 2003 Category: Short Cast: Mark McDonnell, Steven McNicoll, Tracey Robertson, Gavin Mitchell Crew: Producer: Nigel R. Smith – Screenwriter: David Cairns – Editor: Bert Eeles – Cinematographer: Scott Ward – Original Score: Haftor Medboe – Sound: John Cobban – Costumes: Alison Mitchell Sales: Sydney Neter, Sales Manager – SND Films, P.O. BOX 15703 1001 NE AMSTERDAM THE NETHERLANDS – T: 31 20 404 0707 – F: 31 20 404 0708 Email: infosndfilms.com Web: sndfilms.com synopsis Frantic knockabout tragedy ensues when Bobo is sent to clown prison for committing a daring but silly crime. Can he escape in time to prevent his family from bringing shame on all clowndom? director David was born at the fag-end of the Summer of Love in Edinburgh, somewhere in Scotland. He grew up near a television before graduating into cinema. His influences include silent comedy, horror films from the twenties to the seventies, and the cakes of Mr. Kipling. He studied film at Edinburgh College of Art, where he wrote & directed the award winning medieval comedy THE THREE HUNCHBACKS and produced the first film of BAFTA-winner and Tartan Shorts director Morag McKinnon. He has also worked frequently as a film editor, making shorts shorter. Subsequent films as director include supernatural Robert Louis Stephenson adaptations THE BOTTLE IMP and THE ISLE OF VOICES, as well as silent comedy HOW TO GET UP, and CLARIMONDE, the first and so far only film in the school of Scottish Expressionism. Recently he has been working on feature scripts with his partner Fiona Watson and colleague Andrew Gonzalez, and various producers called Nigel. CRY FOR BOBO is his first film with pantaloons in. filmography – Cry For Bobo (2002) – The Isle Of Voices (1995) – Clarimonde (1994) – How To Get Up (1993) – The Bottle Imp (1992) – The Three Hunchbackse (1990)

Steyr, Austria ( History of a town ) #2