War is not an aberrant feature of life as human beings. It’s a constant. It’s an “always” not a “sometimes” between the great leaps made in civilization, in technology, in consciousness, in empathy, there’s a war around the corner to put human beings back into their place on the timeline of the planet. One conflict after another. We can’t seem to live without it.
After Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” I got curious why more movies haven’t been made about the Hundred Years’ War, maybe the most absurd conflict that didn’t happen in the Falkland Islands in our history as a species. One hundred years of conflict. And it’s not even taught in American schools. We seem hellbent on never learning from our violent past.
Here’s a look at two beautiful and terrible works of art about this period, John Huston’s “A Walk with Love and Death” and Bertrand Tavernier’s “Beatrice.” They are unforgiving works of anthropology that come to the same conclusion: man isn’t cut out to survive war.