Expressive movement unit 2

The interplay of the sound design with the camera and shot composition structures an image of continued tension.

After the sudden unrest collapses  (> EMU 1), camera and music mark a change in the staging. First, a moment of standstill is staged in a prolonged, almost static, medium long shot of Dane and Bently looking at one another and in the following long shot of—on the level of shot composition—the slow dissolution of the group. This becomes—also initiated by off-screen gunshot—the starting point of a movement characterized by the meshing of two cinematic patterns.

The temporal dimension of this movement is created in the interplay of a monotonous, repeated, rising string melody and a prolonged medium long shot that varies tracking speeds and changes directions as it follows Sergeant Dane walking through the different stations of the space of action. The rising music lends a specific dynamic to the visual movement. It leads the viewer to anticipate the culmination of Dane’s tour. The steady unrest created by the interplay of music and movement within the shot is given a spatial dimension by the movement itself. The unrest is literally spread by Dane throughout the scene of action.

The stations on this tour establish a parallel staging principle: within the movement carried by the music and the camera there are stops at regular intervals at which Dane’s verbal communication is staged. Each communicative act is accompanied by a change in shot composition; with each address, the depth of space is increasingly accentuated by the figures. Dane’s tour starts with a tableau (Dane, Salazar and Feingold), moves to a space made up of foreground and background (preparation for burial) and ends with a division into foreground, middle and background with Dane at the center (Dane’s final address to the group). The space is thus marked as social space, increasingly permeated by the unrest the cinematic staging connects to Dane.