Expressive movement unit 2

Metadata

In the interaction of sound design and shot composition a potential experience of pain is developed—with no temporal delineation—making death plausible as the mandatory postulate of military order and then provided with transcendental value.

With the catchphrase “Some of us are gonna die for democracy, freedom and equality!”the timbre of the voice-over changes abruptly into an exhortation of cautionary foreboding, which, on the semantic level, closely binds a soldier’s death to heroic sacrifice for the community. At the same time, a dramatic string phrase replaces the previous triumphant trumpets at this point.

In contrast to the calisthenics at the front of the barracks (> EMU 1), this sequence of shots follows the recruits in a thick jungle of obviously more concrete exercises simulating contact with the enemy. Supported by dark shades of gray, the framing takes the soldiers out of the communal body previously steeled in hard drill and presents them individually. In this dissection of the battalion on the level of shot composition, repeatedly the individual body is inserted in different audiovisual projections of the experience of pain: tripping into barbed wire, a bayonet stab and, finally, an ambush.  

Each variation on potential experiences of pain that is shown on the level of visual representation is accompanied by an energetic change on the acoustic level. The semantic references take dying out of the sphere of the individual body and thus give it a transcendental value.  The slow fade of music and voice over and a brightening of the intensity of the image in the last shot of this EMU point towards a last formal permutation.