I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I
saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this
late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old
Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger
artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry.
On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of
auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry
after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful
counterpoint.)
Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally
creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical
1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both
gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them
both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to
the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by
Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s
much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I
remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was
not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect
that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse
of a place, a time, and a people.
Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in
California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism
of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as
the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing,
seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing
“everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish,
and marred by graffiti.
The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur
Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted
the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word
“murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used
L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur,
is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find
much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s
as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)
In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of
L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s
iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of
his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the
Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the
glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall
paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a
large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.
But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also
seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing
the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and
worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists,
are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to
commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.
Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her
celebration of these loud, bright murmurs.
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