Henry V · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A king walks the length of a battlefield carrying a dead boy in his arms, and the camera refuses to cut. Mud, smoke, the dropped weapons of the slain; behind him a soldier's voice begins "Non Nobis, Domine," and Patrick Doyle's score gathers the whole field into a requiem. This is the summit of Branagh's film, and the strange thing about it is that nothing happens. The battle is already won. Henry does not act, decide, or command. He carries, and looks, and we look with him for as long as the shot lasts.

Hold on this, because it tells you what kind of film war has become here. Deleuze divided cinema into two regimes. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it — the sensory-motor circuit, situation to action to new situation, the engine of almost every battle ever filmed. Olivier's 1944 Henry V, the film Branagh is answering point for point, is movement-image in its purest patriotic key: bright heraldry, legible geography, action that resolves into victory and uplift. Branagh keeps Olivier's framing device — Derek Jacobi's Chorus on a bare soundstage — and then inverts everything it introduces. His Agincourt is not a map you can read but a churned scrum shot close and wet, the camera kept down in the mud among bodies. And his battle does not end in action. It ends in slow motion.

That slow motion is the hinge. Deleuze called the moment when the sensory-motor circuit slackens the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, reduced to seeing and enduring. Branagh's whole reading of the play leans into that crisis. The Chorus keeps apologising that the stage cannot hold the war — and in Branagh's hands that apology becomes an honest admission that war itself resists heroic representation. The film dramatises what Shakespeare only reports: Bardolph, an old tavern companion, hanged for looting, with Henry forced to stand and watch the rope. There is no act available. There is only the face, holding what it cannot discharge.

That face is the second concept. The close-up that registers a feeling without releasing it into action Deleuze called the affection-image, and the film is built on it. The dossier's own word is conscience: interiors lit from within the frame by torches, hearths, tapers, faces modelled in chiaroscuro. This is Deleuze's expressionism — not a mood but a method, the light-and-shadow gradient that charges a face and a room with a life the action cannot account for. Branagh's Henry is younger and more burdened than Olivier's, given to sudden cold rage. The firelight keeps catching a man at the threshold of feelings he has no political room to feel.

The slow-motion walk is the third concept, and the most precise. Deleuze has a name for the moment a figure goes still while the world keeps moving around him — the movement of world, where the dancer is absorbed by the dance rather than driving it. Decelerate the image and a soldier's death stops being an event in a chain and becomes pure duration, time you are made to sit inside. The action is over; what is left is its cost, held in front of you until you absorb it. Branagh did not invent this. He inherited it twice: from Kurosawa's Ran, whose siege plays in near-silent slow motion under a mournful orchestral lament with the battle sound suppressed, and from Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, whose cross-cut slow motion first lyricised battlefield death. The "Non Nobis" sequence is those two debts fused and made elegiac.

Place this in the longer conversation. Branagh's authorship template — actor directs himself through Shakespeare in deep chiaroscuro — comes straight from Olivier's Hamlet and Welles's Othello, films that made a handful of sets and bodies read as epic on almost no money. His muddy Agincourt and his interpolated Falstaff flashbacks — Robbie Coltrane glimpsed in memory, the Eastcheap world threaded into a play that only mentions it — are lifted from Welles's Chimes at Midnight, the rapid-cut mire of Shrewsbury and its mortality-shadowed fat knight. Branagh's own invention was not a new image. It was a tonal reversal: taking the most flag-waving of the histories and reading it through post-Vietnam, post-Falklands doubt, letting the time-image leak into the war film.

What did it do? It relocated screen Shakespeare. Before Branagh, English-language Shakespeare on film was mid-century Olivier and Welles and filmed theatre. After him — and largely because this lean, firelit debut worked — came the whole accessible 1990s cycle. He proved the verse could carry a film without spectacle, that you could trust the St. Crispin's Day speech to the voice and the underscoring rather than to armies. And he proved something Deleuze would have recognised: that the most modern thing you can do with a battle is refuse to let it resolve. Watch it again for the cut that never comes — the long walk across the field — and you will find a war film discovering that its truest subject is not the fighting but the watching.