SCENE 19. 2005. Roseanna's uncle meets her at the train. He's just come from a mass dedicated to Mette at his church and he chats about how unique and wacky it is. How they blast music from big speakers, and the minister uses powerpoint.
He tells her that his mother has truly found God now in these last days, and this makes him very happy. He says he and his wife have been her prayer warriors, that he thinks that when communication breaks down two people can find each other again through prayer.
Rose says: "I think prayer is like history or photography. They're things we repeat trying to make sense of ourselves by connecting to everyone else."
"And to God" her uncle says.
"Yeah. And God. I guess."
SCENE 20. Hospital. 2005.
Grama lies on the hospital bed looking very small and sunken with her teeth out.
She tells Roseanna she's fought, but that she knows now that Ben is waiting for her in a field of flowers that are all her grandchildren.
She says: "I believe that so strong I can already see it when I close my eyes. Of course I see lots of things now- it's good to have an imagination when you're on the morphine, you can have all kinds of adventures without getting too scared because you're used to worlds that aren't real. Sometimes I see your uncle and we're fighting together in the war. And every night I see Ben."
She tells Rose that he was her one love for fifty years. When he was sick with the Parkinson's and couldn't be with her, he told her she should take another lover to get what she needs. "Can you imagine? After fifty years to be generous like that? I never in my life slept with another man!"
SCENE 21. The Countess's apartment, draped in pink muslin. 1898.
The Countess welcomes Thiers into her candle lit appartement. He is old and sad looking, she is veiled, worn and shaky. He asks if she has seen the exposition, she says she saw what concerned her but found it tiresome. What she would like to see is higher up- the city from the roof of the new exposition hall. He smiles.
SCENE 22. Up to the roof of the exposition hall.
He takes her past guards, up back staircases to the roof- whispering that from there she will see Haussman's new avenues, and the new train stations.
She says "Ahh, the wide boulevards that paved over the old city, and the temples of thundering speed- no, this is not what I have longed to see."
They arrive, and she looks, and smiles, and then speaks, almost to herself. "There they are! The secret green patches, the hidden gardens of the old convents."
"Madame La Comtesse!" He says, "I had no idea the life of a nun was one you had considered! You who have kept so many secrets and had so many loves."
"So many lovers, so little love. Besides, who knows what went on in there when being a nun was the only thing to do to be even a little bit free! Really, at least there one might imagine one's life was for something, and have a safe spot to sit and try and see one's self."
Below them, in the empty halls of the exposition we move quietly up to a row of paintings, and painted photographs of the countess, and then a statue, and plaster casts of her arms.
SCENE 23. Hospital. 2005.
Alice, the child saved from the Danish orphanage, comes in while Roseanna is somehow trying to say goodbye before she needs to leave to catch her train. Alice is 8 months pregnant. Grama gets the cousins to lie on either side of her in the hospital bed. In the hum of the machines they lie quiet feeling her trembling hot and cancerous, but also peaceful and glad.
SCENE 24. Train. 2005.
Sitting rigid on the train with no books around her, Roseanna keeps her face calm until they pass a field of flowers.
Over the image of the fields moving past the train the medium says, "She is still around in many different forms." We see that Roseanna is listening to the recording of the seance on the train. Through a strange man's voice the Countess talks about the photographer, how he kissed her one deformity- the tiny extra toe that made her dread her own body. She talks about how she sees herself as a consummate fraud, but that artists and frauds often run in the same pack, and are often the same people. She begins to fade as she tells them there is a light, that it's all around them, and as each lie turns to truth the light gets brighter.
SCENE 25. Family home. 2005.
Roseanna and her family sit around a table with boxes of Grama's photo albums. Her uncle announces, with difficulty, that since Grama's death his marriage has fallen apart. It turns out that the strain that was keeping them together was also changing them and tearing them apart, but that he didn't notice until it was all over. "But God," he says, "God is my rock and salvation and this test must be for something."
In the awkward silence they look through the boxes and rip the photos out and distribute them. Roseanna gathers pictures out of context- of her grandmother's house, of Mette as a young woman fishing in Denmark, of Mette and her brothers at a costume party with blackout curtains on the windows.
Roseanna breaks the silence to tell her uncle about her grandmother's morphine dream: that he and Mette are in the underground together during the war and that he's her rescuer. He smiles with tears in his eyes and the table is quiet.
Alice is holding a new baby. Alice says "These pictures are so strange. It feels like there's an album missing with all the stuff I remember in it."
Roseanna, playing with the baby's toes says "I feel like she looks like Grama."
Alice says "Why, because she has no teeth?" and Roseanna laughs and says "yeah."
SCENE 26. In Paris in the late summer. 1899.
The Countess's home and all of her possessions are investigated, cataloged, and burned by Italian police. What is left is collected by Louisa. She sits among her things, digging through the boxes of photos, delicately separating out the hundreds that are of Virginia, and finds the last set- of the Countess old, severe, and ill in her dim apartment.
Over this we begin to hear Roseanna reading, and then...
SCENE 27. Lecture hall. 2006.
We see she is speaking in a darkened room to an audience of students and professors. In the darkness we also see her boyfriend and the medium. The photographs, the ones Louisa found and saved, are projected large above Roseanna's head, clicking slowly by, and the light from the projector is cast across her face. The slides are ordered so as to echo the Countess's appearance to the medium in the first scene: moving from age to youth and then through the cycle again.
"I guess the question we're asking, the question we keep wanting to ask of people from the past who made surprising decisions, mistakes, innovations, art, is a question of intention. Why did Virginia make the photographs? Was she seeking to capture her beauty, or did she want to capture something else? Would we believe her if she could give us an answer? What answer would satisfy us, and who has the authority to respond?
I think we're allied with each attempt to own her, unless we differ from all the look-ers that came before. Have I somehow accessed the truth about these images and stories where others have failed, or do you just see a skinny fraud hiding behind this act of academic mediation? Because I am a fraud, cutting and pasting these ideas and voices together, trying to show you what to see in the Countess, which is, of course, what I want to see.
How we'll be remembered, how we're being seen, what seconds will be caught, what will be saved or lost: These are just life's endless, flipping possibilities.
And that is the story of the Countess's photography.
She smiles, "You'll have to give me a grade, Sir; and deciding the artist/fraud thing will I guess, eventually, be up to other people's eyes. But for now I can decide that it doesn't matter, that they're not so different, and that the one I see is up to me."
The pictures circle through from age to youth and then the screen goes dark.