"The Suspended Step of the Stork" and its Score by Greek Composer Eleni Karaindrou
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, 77).
To be frank, the movie, "The Suspended Step of the Stork" is a difficult one to describe since it switches between surrealism and realism very quickly. The setting is the mountainous border area between Greece and Albania, a land of bitter and harsh contrasts (Georgakas, 1998). There is a reporter there trying to interview displaced Athenians who were running away from the amazing and terrible purge that the military had created. In his research,...