Mur murs

It's a documentary of murals in Los Angeles. It's roller-skaters, local folks, and the various murals. It's a nice time capsule. It's an interesting path to drive down and investigate the local communities. It has interviews with some of the artists. I would like time-elapsed montages of the artists working on their murals. It's nice to hear from these unknown artists.

Paris is a city of mansard roofs; London of chimney pots; New York of wooden water towers atop buildings. All are decreed y architects, builders, the laws of hydraulics. For Agnes Varda, in the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles was a city of murals, created by the people who live among them. This documentary begins by showing us the murals, and then the culture of the artists who make them.

It's a sociological sort of movie, a type she would return to with works like LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE. Looking at that, she realized her interest was personal, that its subject reflected her passion for finding the small remnants of value overlooked by the modern world. Surely this subject's interest is finding the art all around that no one else seems to have noticed.

The French director Agnes Varda spent a couple of different years in Los Angeles, and this particular year produced her documentary "Murs, murs" and her fiction film "Documenteur". The title means "Walls, walls", but also puns with the word "murmurs." Varda located dozens of murals around LA and filmed them. Many of these are gone today, so this is a true documentary, documenting a wonderful aspect of southern Californian visual culture. She interviews the artists, a truly multicultural and multicolored group--and shows the paintings in their urban contexts. One memorable scene shows a mural at Venice Beach with young people dancing in front of it (probably near where their sons and daughters are roller skating or skateboarding now). An enjoyable movie by a European with deep aesthetic appreciation for marvelous, imaginative, colorful imagery that was considered throwaway pop culture at the time.

Apart from many re-releases due to the anniversary of the film in question, this year there are also many retrospectives. After the Kurosawa retrospective not so long ago I am now in the middle of two retrospectives of French speaking directors. There is a retrospective of the work of the Dardenne brothers on the arthouse streaming service and a retrospective of Agnes Varda at my local arthouse cinema.

The only film of Varda I had seen up till now was "Cleo de 5 a 7", a fiction film from 1962. From the retrospective I selected "Mur Murs", a documentary from 1981 and "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse", also a documentary but this time from the year 2000. It is not a coincidence that two of the three films are documentaries. Much if the oeuvre of Varda is situated in the grey zone between fiction and non fiction.

"Mur murs" is a documentary about wall paintings in Los Angelos, a subject that is close to the heart of Varda. At the end of her career she revisited the subject of wallpaintings in "Visages villages" (2017). During the film I was a little uncomfortable about watching a movie about wall paintings in LA but never had participated in an existing bycicle tour along wall paintings in my hometown Breda in the Netherlands.

Some of the paintings, described by Varda as "mythical snakes that wind through the city", are really beautiful. Often the artist is allowed to elucidate his work of art. The fact that daily life goes on in front of the walls give the documentary a playful accent.

It becomes clear that many wall paintings are made by artists of foreign descendant. In their work they illustrate the difficulties that immigrant groups have adapting to the American society. In this respect it is not unthinkable that the Trump adminstration will inspire many more wall paintings.

Despite the fact that the film shows (as mentioned earlier) many beautiful paintings and remains playful at the end I missed the overarching story. A story that is for example present in a film such as "Russian ark" (2002, Aleksandr Sokurov), after all a film that is also predominantly about paintings.

Agnès Varda may be a French director, but her work in L.A. is easily some of her best. Mur Murs is an incredible documentary, filming and preserving not only the mural art (some of it paid commercial art, some of it commissioned, and some of it illegal) that is all around L.A. but interviewing the artists as well and finding out the touching and interesting reasons why people turn to this art form.

It's a very spare documentary, despite the interviews there is not a lot of talking, and the majority of the time the camera is busy filming the murals and people walking in front of it.

It's a wonderful outsiders look at something that the people who live there must take for granted, but as someone who has never visited Los Angeles I appreciated the look into this beautiful art form.