Expressive movement unit 3

The music becomes more elegiac; slower, calmer and deeper. In the foreground is the silhouette of a back-lit standing soldier who looks through a quadratic frame that the shot composition creates with the railing and the deck above him. This frame follows the fade-out from the quadratic American flag. The landscape is a topos of the sublime: a calm ocean,  a vast horizon, clouds in the sky, the surface of the water glittering and the dark silhouette of a ship can be made out. This shot, which lasts around 10 seconds, prepares for the moment of calm to follow, the service. This frame-like composition makes the archival footage that follows of a burial at sea function like images from a historic gallery. Archival material taken from a bird’s eye perspective can be seen: a coffin draped in a flag is carried onto a deck; many soldiers (some not fully dressed) look downward abashedly; the coffin is let into the water (although the material does not actually show the moment of sliding into the water, this is made palpable by the splash of the coffin in the ocean); a rifle salute follows. The moment of sublimity merges into the collective consciousness of national mourning. In this way the expressive movement unit functions as a whole as a moment of calm in commemoration of the victims of war who fought for their country.