Expressive movement unit 2

The growing fear and tension and its transition to shocked certainty, slowly replaced by mourning is staged by the interplay of character constellations, shot composition and a change from moving to standing camera. In addition, the uncertainty of the situation is conveyed by the fog on the ground and the total silence.  

Dane and Bently, moving horizontally from left to right away from the soldiers staring in their direction at the back left of the frame, are shown in a long pan with no music or background noises. Their slow walking movements change from a ducking to standing position—the fog becomes thicker—their eyes are focused off-screen. Taken together, the length and slowness create a choreography of tension building into fear.

The simultaneous stop of Dane and Bently’s movement and the change in the direction of the pan as the camera pulls back mark the moment in which fear turns into shock as does, after a short pause, the start of music.  This brief standstill is divided into three spatial planes: the sword in the foreground, Dane and Bently in the middle and the soldiers in the background. The close-ups, the tilt shot of the sword disappearing into the fog, the spoken name of the missing man and the visual omission foster the viewer’s imagination of brutal mutilation.

In the tableau that follows, accompanied by quiet, mournful music, the rigid staggering of the character composition is broken and a diagonal axis is formed along which the figures are distributed and move to the front or the back. In this way, the formation of mourning is a variation of the interrupted formation of military order in EMU 1.