Festival d'Avignon: Comparative Historical Record - Annotation
This post discusses a video document:
Ina Culture. “Le Festival d’Avignon.” Youtube, featuring Terry Hands, Michel Aumont, Francois Chaumette, J. Dupont, Georges Aminel, Michel Etcheverry, Jean Paul Roussillon, and Pierre Dux. Images from the archive of INA Institut National de L’Audiovisuel, July 9th 2012,
This video, shot in 1974, aims to describe and promote the Avignon festival. The festival was by that time ten years into the second stage of its growth by including works outside of those created by Jean Vilar (and three years after Vilar’s death). Richard III director Terry Hands explains his goal to focus on the actor, since the actor is the only part of their play as real as the space: the Cours d’Honneur. Clips of both Richard III and Oedipe a Colone are shown in juxtaposition with interviews with their directors, a tour group being led through the Palais des Papes (the performance venue) and shots of the city below the Palais des Papes including tourists and an audience enjoying the antics of a street performer. Pierre Dux, the managing director of the Comedie Francaise at the time, is interviewed on the two aforementioned shows that will be appearing at the festival in the Cours d’Honneur, and uses the opportunity to display his confidence in the shows and promote their success. At the time, this video was a promotional investigation showing theatre audiences what the festival had to offer, but today this video is relevant to the work of understanding the festival’s history and the context of the plays shown there, specifically at the Cours d’Honneur, which is a large space reserved for special shows. The tour group going through the space outlines its reverence and importance to the history of the city of Avignon, and the classic theatre played there speaks to the tone of history which was being maintained in the space at that time. This begs the comparison of plays shown there today, such as La Fiesta, which is a direct contradiction of classical arts. By examining this record of both the performance space (the Cours d’Honneur) and the festival space (Avignon), one can investigate the topic of genre history within a festival context. The visual record, which confirms that the space itself has remained relatively untouched compared with the content, is very useful to that end, as is Terry Hand’s claim about the reality of the space. As a historical record, this video does falter in that it requires supplemental written information about who the speakers are--the verbal record--to understand its context. While the video may have difficulty existing as a standalone record, it still serves to question the nature and use of the space in a historical context in comparison with today’s festival in the same space.
