Duration 4.34
"Three biographies in two since the Fallari brothers consider themselves inseparable. Biographies sixteen and seventeen introduce the members of the VUE Commission - the Prime Narrator, Colin Cantlie - the Commission's Chief Linguist, Bwythan Fallbutus - the Commission's VUE Storyteller, Leasting Fallvo, and - the Commission's Medical Official.
The objective position of the Linguist and the Storyteller will later be eroded when they themselves become the subjects of biography. These biographies see the introduction of Doctor Frederich Haberlein, contentious VUE hero, who is reputed to have discovered the fossil remains of the first true primitive bird, Archaeopteryx. The validity of his claim and the significance of his find are continuing VUE arguments.
Other introductions include the characteristic of VUE victims to travel round and round in small circles, the metaphor of the grounded aircraft, the return of the crow, this time as Carroll's 'monstrous crow as big as a tar-barrel', and the children's illustrated book The Red Chair."
- Peter Greenaway, The New Social Function of Cinema, BFI, 1981
Ipson and Pulat Fallari were brothers in fiction, and half-brothers in fact, or thanks to Tulse Luper, maybe the other way around. Either way they were inseparable.
Ipson Fallari on the right is marginally the eldest, his mother being Iloge Kyle, who was the eldest twin-sister of Cloge Kyle, who was the mother of Pulat. The next improbable fact is more difficult, the fourteenth edition of the VUE Directory declared the brothers to be dead, shot in an airport hotel in Medina Sidonia by the only legitimate son of their father. The Directory is then silent for two years only to resurrect them in the seventeenth edition, this time spelling Ipson as Ipsan.
The father of the Fallari brothers, Crozier Fallari Raphael, was a feathering and marbling cafe painter. And in 1939, he'd married a cafe proprietor's widow in the Carcenne District of Brussels. To this lady he'd given a son, Tason Raphael. The following year Crozier Raphael joined the British Royal Air Force and met the refugee Walloon twins, Iloge and Cloze Kyle.
Crozier was killed at Dunkirk and the Kyle twins each delivered a son within the same three-hour period. These two boys were christened Fallari after their father's second Christian name, and they had reached their 18th birthday before they became aware of the existence of yet another and legitimate stepbrother.
Thinking of themselves as twins of twins, Ipson and Pulat believed themselves to possess charmed lives. They took great physical risks. They became air-couriers and then learnt to fly. They practiced parachuting and worked for a Canadian circus. One New Year's Eve they climbed the west front of Cologne Cathedral, and for an encore, crossed the Rhine, jumping from ice-floe to ice-floe. They ended up in the freezing water, and against expectation, survived.
But the Violent Unknown Event abruptly changed their luck. From having shared so much, from now on they were to share only the symptoms of high blood-pressure and perfectly synchronized blackouts. They were obliged to relinquish their pilot's licence. For Ipson it was not an enormous loss, but Pulat still took any opportunity he could to sit at the controls of a small plane and taxi it in small circles until the fuel was exhausted.
Bwythan Fallbutus: "Ipson spoke Allow-ease and Pulat spoke Capistan. Allow is terse and impersonal, full of abbreviations and imperatives as though intended for use on a parade-ground, or at best, for the writer of Instruction-Manuals. Capistan is a lazy, gentle language, spoken largely from the front of the mouth and requiring unusual amounts of saliva and above average exposure of the tongue. The two languages are as remote from one another as it appears possible to get. The Fallari brothers' adroit and inexhaustible cross-talk was at an end."
Previous to the VUE, only one event in their lives had so thoroughly come between them, and that had been Ipson's marriage to Stachia Lacquer. The introduction of the third party had stretched fraternal loyalties intolerably. After two years of increasingly impossible situations, swapped identities and frustrated privacy, Stachia had walked out. There was no way of persuading the VUE to leave.
Leasting Fallvo: "The Fallari half-brothers had experienced several years of the VUE's malevolence, when accompanying a party of naturalists, they visited Medina Sidonia on a forced fueling-stop. They became friendly with the airport controller and his wife. As was customary when meeting strangers, before long, the Fallari brothers had communicated their complicated origins, to the amused delight of the airport controller's wife.
At three o'clock the following morning, the airport controller burst into the Fallari hotel room and shot at Ipson and Pulat with an emergency distress-pistol. The controller turned out to be Tason Raphael, the Fallaris' stepbrother, the only legitimate son of their father. All three protagonists were found unconscious. They'd blacked out. The Fallaris with high blood pressure and the stepbrother with alcohol."
From this incident, and no doubt with a little assistance from Tulse Luper's fictional account of the Fallari life-history, the Commission Directory drew its own conclusions. A close scrutiny of a plane's passenger list leaving Medina Sidonia the day after the incident, would have shown, if not the names Ipson and Pulat Fallari, then the names of Ipson and Pulat Raphael, save Ipson's name had been spelt Ipsan.
The Falls Biographies
