A History of Violence

Friday A/V Club: Aggression, from the dawn of life to the nuclear age

Ishu Patel's film The Bead Game (1977) is a five-and-a-half-minute history of creatures killing each other. It starts with single-celled organisms and then progresses through the animal kingdom; hominids show up about midway through, then weapons appear and get increasingly destructive. The whole thing is told through stop-motion animation, and every image is created out of nothing but glass beads.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)