The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

“How does one leave?”

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This question haunts The Suspended Step Of The Stork, Part I of Theo Angelopoulos’s “Borders” trilogy. A film of subcutaneous power, it finds beauty where there is suffering, stark yet foggy, as if through tearful recollection. Peeling layers to the emotional center of Stork is composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose soundtracks were never so much inserted into as bled from the late Greek director’s canvases. Hers is the audio equivalent of a tracking shot, scrolling through face, space, and race with barest touch. “Refugee’s Theme” shrouds the credits like an overture to lives whose variations are leaves on a tree of displacement.

Of those lives we get only leitmotifs, each seeming far too short in the grander symphony of human suffering. Like the bodies floating in the opening shot, they bob at the whim of two rhythms: one natural, the other mechanical...

(https://ecmreviews.com)

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