The battle
The battle is the focal point of these narratives and is highly anticipated. Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V presents a very polished depiction of the Battle of Agincourt. The camera focuses on the king, the figure of a charismatic war leader. Made before the Normandy landings, the film seeks to exploit patriotic sentiment. The historical fact in the film becomes a vehicle for a political message.
In 1989, Kenneth Branagh depicts a battlefield on a human scale in his Henry V. Mud is omnipresent and blood flows freely. Over forty years, the way war is represented in cinema has changed. The historian François Amy de la Bretèque attributes this to 'the evolution of the forms of warfare at the end of our century'. Chivalric warfare no longer exists, and its perennial victims are the lowly combatants, the common people.
These scenes emphasise the supposed extreme level of conflict of the Middle Ages.