What techniques have been used to make the opening scenes of Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan' emotive and realistic

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 What techniques have been used to make the opening scenes of Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ emotive and realistic?

        

When the film first starts we see an American flag, it is unlike any others from a war film, most war films show the flag to be very glorious, neat, and with bright colours, this flag is different, the colours are de-saturated, it is very faint and worn, it is creased and messy. I think Spielberg has done this to show that his film is unlike most others, it does not show the war being glorious and the soldiers being brave, instead he is going to show the real side of the war, how horrible of a place the war was, and how scared and confused the soldiers were.

        While the flag is being shown music is being played, it is a brass band playing a military song that is very slow and sad. This music is very emotive and tells the audience that the film is not going to be a glorious war film, but a sad and upsetting war film. As the flag disappears we see a graveyard, the camera is low down and inline with the graves, we can only see a few graves, then as the camera slowly increases is height we can see the thousands upon thousands of graves appear, this gives a very sad feel to the scene, the audience know that each one of these graves represents a person who has died fighting for there country, this brings a lot of sadness. We then see an elderly man walking with his younger family, he is slightly in front of his family and we can see that is having trouble walking, he walks towards a grave we do not get to see the name, he drops to his knees and starts to cry, we instantly know he was is the war and this is one of his dead comrades, from how he was walking the audience now knows what damage the war could have done to him, they can see that the effects can last forever. The man looks very upset and is crying, this shows the audience how upset this man must be, shows them how bad the war was for the soldiers.

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        The camera closes in on his face; we can see that he has an expression on his face, we can tell that is trying to remember something, the camera gets closed to his face, and into his eyes. We can start to hear the sound of waves crashing into the shore; we then start to hear guns and engine noise. The brass band slowly dies out as the sound of water and guns takes its place. This builds the tension because there is not any dialogue and it goes straight into a very different where the soldiers are in a ...

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