Expressive movement unit 1

While the narrator’s calm voice-over provides information on the interim state of war, underscored by quiet elegiac music, documentary images are shown: The surviving, but exhausted soldiers return, wading to the beach through the water (not in orderly rows), the dead and wounded are carried and the wounded are given medical care. Then there is a transition from the archival material to the staged film, depicting individual soldiers: A wounded survivor, with victims of war being extradited in the background, is sent home and a dead soldier is blessed by a chaplain. A conspicuous symmetry is created between the two images, as if two sides of the same coin dealt by fate are being shown. At the same time, animated activity can be observed in the background and there is a palpable visual/material separation, much sharper in the case of the dead man than in that of the wounded man. The scene after the battle thus makes a desolate impression: The viscous movement due to exhaustion and the weeding out of the dead and wounded from all further movement.