Nitrate Film: Saint Crispin’s Day
Laurence Olivier’s Henry V

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

Shakespeare’s Henry V bookends the Second World War. With Churchill embracing the Saint Crispin Day Speech as Britain entered the conflict and Olivier turning out its definitive version in his 1944 adaptation, the War is permanently encoded in this apex history play.

Olivier blurs the boundaries between mediatic forms. On screen, the artifice of the Globe Theatre maquette gives way to on-location Agincourt. The film’s narrative collapse today evokes a sense of a shared hallucination in a game universe. 

As Shakespeare was invested in the principle of the unity of time, place, and action, Olivier unifies history with myth, and cinema with theatre. In them, war establishes a peaceful ‘glorious reign’. Henry V deftly takes a crowd of consumers of history-as-entertainment and turns them into the participants of the moment’s conflict. 

Nitrate Film is a series of screenings selected by the film programmer Kit Ramsay, accompanied by discussions led by friends of Verdurin. The events animate live, public critique, bringing attention to filmic artefacts deserving perdurance. 

The series reconstitutes a critical audience, from camera to projector. The flammable Nitrate Film disrupts cinema’s proximity to reality that, in turns, breeds passivity in judgement. Where cinema’s rhetoric — or even propaganda — looks measured and life-size, the discussions separate them from the larger-than-life gestures of theatre.