Love

Abstract

In The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Agnès Varda includes footage of an exhibition of her photographs of Jean Vilar and his troupe of actors in the early years of the Avignon Festival.¹ She shows images of the large-scale prints slowly unwrapped, the portraits appearing at first ghostly behind protective air bubbles. Dressed in black, in the chapel, Varda comments on the actors in the photographs. As she holds up a plate of flower petals, rosebuds and double- flowered begonias, she says: ‘Mostly what I see, is they’re dead’. She continues: ‘So I’ve brought them roses. Roses and begonias.’ As her emotion seems overwhelming, the film cuts to a long shot so that we see Varda and a camera filming her. She scatters flowers beneath the framed images, creating a trail as she goes. She salutes Jean Vilar and Maria Casarès, and speaks across images of Gérard Philipe and Philippe Noiret. Her photograph of this latter pair of actors, blown up to a large scale, shows Noiret resting his hand on Philipe’s shoulder. The gesture resembles consolation, as the film finds fleeting symmetry between its images of once- living actors and the moving memorial Varda creates. Particular to this scene, and its rhythm, are Varda’s words of lament. She scatters flowers for ‘Gérard Philipe, gone. For Noiret, dead. For Denner, dead. For Germaine Montero, dead’. She speaks of her admiration for Vilar, and of how Philipe was loved, and the camera shows an image of the scattered roses as she says again: ‘And he’s dead’.