Expressive movement unit 2

The tense feeling (> EMU 1) remains the main point of reference for the staging. The tension returns not only in the soldiers’ postures, but is also created through the camera movement. The pressure to create more dynamic developed in the previous unit is picked up without being resolved. On the one hand the long, flowing pan along the line of battle is contrasted with the fixed framing of the group portrait in EMU 1. On the other hand, as a horizontal movement it emphasizes the line of orientation of the soldiers waiting at their positions in the depths of the image and thus marks a delay. (When Sailor goes to man his post, a tree stump that juts into the frame’s depth in the lower right corner of the image points to his post like an arrow.) The camera’s movement is very like pacing in front of the starting line, which at the same time is brought into the image. The soldiers’ bodily orientation towards the ground (Sailor and Feingold duck while they walk, Todd and Epps crouch behind their machine guns), Feingold's hushed voice, the horizontal line that moves towards the top and out of the image in the course of the pan, and the leaves that repeatedly block the image’s foreground transfer the staging of a crouched waiting position to the image space in general.