The Score of The Suspended Step of the Stork

Eleni Karaindrou, who has been called the finest film score composer in Greece began life in a small mountain village of Teichio. She moved to Athens and enrolled in the Hellenikon Odion (similar in concept to Juliard) and then from 1969 to 1974 obtained a degree in ethnomusicology in Paris and, then came back to Greece where she founded the Laboratory for Traditional Instruments at the ORA Cultural Centre. Many of her movies have been in collaboration with the noted Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos. As a matter of fact, Angelopoulos brings Karaindrou in on pre production meetings so that she has the feel for the entire project ( Cacoulidis, 1997).

Some critics argue that Eleni Karaindrou's compositions for cinema transcend the soundtrack's conventions. Her music does not merely accompany or prettify a film, they argue, but is an essential element of it (Cacoulidis, 1996, 34). The Greek film critic and novelist, Nikos Triantafillides, once wrote that

Karaindrou's music is as vast n scope as the time-transgressing sequence shots of Angelopoulos. . .in all these hundreds of feet of film, Eleni's music represents the blood not shed on the screen. Her constant presence. . .reveals something deeply spiritual beneath the lyricism . . .it is a music made to wound and liberate as it creates new visions and ideas which counterpoint or parallel the cinematic action (Burlingame & Crowdus, 1995

. . .
ppening. Karaindrou admits that she does this on purpose. She bases her scoring ideas on the movement of the camera [which] is, fundamentally, more important than my relationship to the screenplay. Of course, the music has to underline the story, but the meaning of film is not always explicit in the script. Image and music have to combine to say what cannot easily be said in words. Sometimes you look at a screenplay and it seems like nothing: As Harold Pinter says, the real meaning is behind the words. With the music I'm trying to contribute a kind of counterpoint to the story influenced by all components of the film - scenario, location, actor, montage. I'm looking for the rhythm inside (Walsh, 1996, 50). The town in the movie is called, in Greek, the "waiting room" inasmuch as everyone who is there is a refugee running away from something, and waiting for their chance to cross the border and go to a new life. The film is very political, and we finally find that there is a strong social conscience. In fact, it is almost polemic in spots. As Karaindrou says "being a refugee is an internal condition more than an external one. . .We've passed the borders but we're still here. How many frontiers do we have to pass to get h
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1227
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)