Expressive movement unit 1

Metadata

The first two shots bring the approaching squad and the figure of the Colonel together in the cinematic space in the following way: A pan brings the Colonel into the foreground and the battalion forms a half-circle around him.

Five shots delineate the spatial relationship of battalion and Colonel more clearly using the shot/reverse shot technique. Despite spatial order and authoritative address, the Colonel is not staged as the counterpart of the squad. Instead, the visual composition places him, within the reverse shots as well, in the center of the image’s foreground. In the background the battalion, beyond the cadre, extends out of focus to fill the frame. The individual soldier’s lines of sight repeatedly cross at the spatial position of the Colonel. This structure of repetition in the way the image operates (redundancy of the lines of sight, shot/reverse shot technique) highlights the temporality in which the squad and its fatherly head become a unit as a moment of prolonged duration.

The shot that follows pans the faces of individual soldiers. By means of fluctuating exposure value their unchanging expressions are woven into a net that forms one physiognomic expression—on a supra-individual level—which is the true addressee of the fatherly address. The last of the following four shot/reverse shots frames the squad, once again in movement, without the Colonel and thus ends the circle begun with the scene's first shot.