Word: agincourt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...culmination of the film is the Battle of Agincourt--the wartime victory against the French which every young English Schulkind cherishes and commits to memory. However, Branagh explores the complicated ironies of the triumphant underdogs. With long and short shots, we see the full-scale massacre of chaos as well as the upclose bitterness and mudspattered savagery of war. Branagh's final elegy is a tragic pacan to the misery of battle. Corpses strewn across the fields in a violent fashion are a gruesome testament to the brutal pain before us. Branagh plays up the ambiguity--he lets us recognize...
...more puzzling when you consider that historians are sure to write of 1991 as America's best year since 1945. (They are not deflected from such judgments by GNP declines of 0.76%.) The year began, after all, with the most smashing military victory this side of Agincourt, a victory that demonstrated not just American military prowess but also diplomatic skill, technological pre- eminence and national will. And the year ended with the collapse, indeed the total evaporation of America's most implacable foe, a global giant that had vowed to bury us and spent the better part of 45 years...
...thousands of years since, there have been fake epics and poems, fake royal seals and family trees, fake historical relics (from chastity belts to spurs of warriors killed on the field of Agincourt), fake newspapers, propaganda photos, films and books. Some of these, like the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by a 19th century Russian anti-Semite, have had appalling political consequences. Others, like the work of the fictional bard Ossian and the skull of Piltdown man, have had deep cultural ones. Others still, like the phony mermaids that turned up in the cabinets of Renaissance...
...Grandparents out there," said Bush in his State of the Union speech, "tell your grandchildren the story of struggles waged, at home and abroad, of sacrifices freely made for freedom's sake." Maybe a speechwriter had just seen Kenneth Branagh addressing the troops at Agincourt in the new movie of Henry V: "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,/ Will stand a- tiptoe when this day is named . . ./ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he'll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day . . .This story shall the good man teach his son." Well...