HAROLD PINTER, British playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor

MARGUERITE DURAS, French novelist, screenwriter, writer, and filmmaker

AGNES VARDA, French film-director, photographer, and artist

Normandy and Place des Voges, France

Marguerite 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...

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