Pinter Meets Duras and Varda on the Beach: A Screenplay

Abstract

HAROLD PINTER, British playwright, screenwriter, director, and actorMARGUERITE DURAS, French novelist, screenwriter, writer, and filmmakerAGNES VARDA, French film-director, photographer, and artistNormandy and Place des Voges, FranceMarguerite Duras's The Malady of Death; Blue Eyes, Black Hair; and La Pute de la Cote Normande, and Agnès Varda's Les Plages d 'Agnes and Villages Visages all inscribe the Normandy beaches as sites of encounter, observation, contemplation, terror, and the possibility of impossibility. The wide, bright, nearly unending stretches of white sand edged in distant indigoes host insights gleaned from gleaming loss, joy snatched from waves of ethernities (Jarry on purpose here), and a sense of the incommensurabilities of media, both with one another and with the presence they vainly try to capture. As Duras and Varda contemplate the sands/screens of memory/presence, Harold Pinter observes them, a potential Matchseller coming into the sandy “garden” of nostalgic ache. Pinter finally converses with them as they all begin to envision comingled scenes from the multiple pasts of their works.Sounds of the sea mixed with very subdued sound of people talking. Tentative beginnings of first musical theme. Fade up to Yellow Screen dissolves to Red Screen dissolves to mid-section close-up of woman in red dress pulling back to long shot of red dress woman in Honfleur, which gradually dissolves to Vermeer painting of Delft, which dissolves back to view of Honfleur to close-up of woman in red dress walking along the quai, which dissolves to woman walking in Place des Vosges that zooms in to close-up of red dress that dissolves to Red Screen dissolving back to yellow, dissolves to close-up of sand dissolving to close-up of wheat pulling back to wheatfield dissolving to shot of Varda and JR on road back to close-up of wheat to sand pulling back to beach and sea and finally to sea. Long duration of sea shot. Sounds of ocean lower as distant sounds of people talking emerge, a bit of cacophony. The chatter resolves itself into a duet of voices, Marguerite and Agnes, musical theme low in the background.1