Documenteur

 

Writer/director Agnès Varda

Varda with Sabine Mamou

Varda on the beach with her son Mathieu

DOCUMENTEUR              A                                                                                                        France  USA  (65 mi)  1981  d: Agnès Varda

The tone of this small-scale film is introspective, arguably the most personal and poetic film Varda ever made, while it’s also reportedly her favorite, one of few filmmakers who can get to the depths of melancholy and aloneness, listed in the opening credits as “An Emotion Picture.”  Set in Los Angeles when Varda was alone with her young son, having temporarily separated from her bisexual husband Jacques Demy, who was involved with a young story editor named David Bombyk, where the film captures the pervasive sense of loneliness and alienation.  Varda and Demy spent several years in Los Angles at the end of the 1960’s, where she became fascinated with the proliferation of murals around the city, so a subsequent move to Venice Beach from 1979 to 1981 revitalized that interest.  Written in the shadow of Mur Murs (1981), a kaleidoscopic documentary on painting that explores the striking, largely Chicano murals that decorate the city of Los Angeles with immense graphic designs filling empty concrete spaces, often staged for dramatic effect, this was intended to be seen as a companion piece, conceived as twin films, released in theaters as a double bill, where the two are inextricably linked, with overlapping images and ideas, as this picks up from the final shot of the earlier film and incorporates elements from it.  Different in appearance and tone, more downbeat than the sunny predecessor, this film is a work of pure fiction that blurs the lines, bridging the gap between documentary and fiction, incorporating Varda’s expertise as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist, overflowing with subtle visual poetry, providing a seamless transition into a bohemian neighborhood of artists and misfits bordering the sea.  A meditative portrait of outsiderism and urban isolation, this film lingers, like many of Varda’s films, on fictionalized women who end up alone, often in the company of strangers who drift in and out of their lives, typically played by nonactors, who sometimes repel and sometimes attract them, with none more compelling than the stubborn determination of Sandrine Bonnaire’s homeless teenage hitchhiker in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), perhaps the most important film in Varda’s career, seen through the eyes of many people, a wrenching portrait of bleak desolation.  Here the protagonist is played by Sabine Mamou, an editor for both Varda and Jacques Demy in the 80’s, appearing in her lone acting role as Emilie Cooper, a French woman who floats through California’s Venice Beach with her young son after a devastating breakup, still obsessed by her immediate past which she cannot detach herself from, flooded by a sense of anguish and nostalgia, with a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness voiceover, “bodies separated…words…shattered phrases,” existing in her own existential space of wandering, loneliness, and erotic dreams.  In a moment of brilliant intertextuality, Emilie is hired by a documentary crew to narrate a film in French about the city’s outdoor murals, cleverly integrating herself into her own film, where the voice heard on the playback happens to be Varda’s, which startles Emilie, not sounding like herself, which they amusingly slough off by saying “No one ever recognizes their own voice.”  With excerpted sequences shown in her video memoir Varda by Agnès (Varda par Agnès) (2019), with Varda acknowledging the film is the story of an introverted Los Angeles, while also confessing pure joy in filming real people, this is a film without any real drama, yet what’s inseparable is the little boy by her side, eight-year old Martin (Mathieu Demy, Varda’s own son), who somehow fits the rhythm of the film.

With its meditative tone of muted anguish, this deeply moving, semi-autobiographic portrayal can be described as a first person essay, narrated throughout by none other than actress Delphine Seyrig, the subject of Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), while also appearing in an assortment of dazzling costume changes in the puzzling Alain Resnais experimental film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), as she can be heard spouting ruminations on words, ideas, sadness, and loss.  Offering an immersion of awareness and feeling, Varda adopts a strategy of shooting through windows, with improvised piano outbursts from composer Georges Delerue, 03:22, but when the recorded tapes were discovered damaged after Delerue returned to Paris, the music was actually performed by Michel Colombier in the style of Delerue.  A recurring motif seen throughout the film is Emilie working in the seaside home of her employer as a filmmaker’s secretary, sitting at a desk with her back to the camera, typing endless revisions of scripts in front of a window facing the open sea, as people on a surprisingly empty beach drift in and out of the frame, endlessly smoothing the sands, like a Zen garden, picking up every last piece of litter seemingly contaminating the image of perfection, while one lone straggler may be lying on a towel catching the rays, always seen off in the distance, with wistful and serene beach shots that foreshadow The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès) (2008).  Something should be said about Mamou, as she lays it all on the line, offering a very vulnerable performance as the stand-in for the director herself, getting at the emotional core of what the film is trying to say, accentuating the dreary confinement of working mothers who cannot escape the regimented daily routine.  First off, there are the faces, with Nurith Aviv’s camera creating an interactive montage of blank, lonely faces which “seem more real than what’s conveyed by words,” as they wordlessly play out in a series of street encounters.  Bridging the language barrier, many visitors in foreign lands often find themselves reading faces, as it’s a universal language, where the captured moods can be so expressive.  At one point, Varda’s camera wanders into the midst of a domestic dispute, with the couple hurling insults at one another, turning into a shoving match, where you never know at any moment if it will spill out of control, yet she’s looking at the world with fresh eyes.  Mother and son often wander through the streets exploring the neighborhood, including a fishing bridge, a snack shop, a walk along the beach, and a Mexican street festival featuring mariachi bands, encountering not only the famous boardwalk and its roller skaters, but also homelessness, crime, unemployment, and unwanted furniture left on sidewalks, caught up in the collective swell of the city’s distinctly different cultural characteristics, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, where Martin’s wearing a T-shirt that reads “My Mom & Dad went to California but all I got was this dumb T-shirt.”  In this sense, the film resembles Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), where a fictional character wanders through live footage of the street violence erupting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when protesters gathered to demonstrate against the continuing war in Vietnam and ended up being assaulted by the police.  Varda’s film on the other hand explores a world of foreigners and transients, featuring a stream of working class people from all walks of life, seen as a melting pot for various immigrant groups, where as the playback suggests, her films beg the question, does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

Emilie struggles to find lodging, living temporarily in multiple residences, with her belongings scattered, and is seen wandering through the neighborhood, eventually finding a non-descript, box-like home situated in a complex with other similarly built homes, where the camera often finds moments of Martin playing on his own, where he’s free to roam, left unsupervised for long stretches, seen playing on his skateboard, yet often caught wandering through the maze-like labyrinth of corridors between apartment buildings, where there are also moments he finds himself desperately alone, pleading to sleep in his mother’s bed, needing reassurance for the anxieties felt within.  His feeling mirrors the overwhelming depression and sense of grief engulfing Emilie from the breakup, where she has to calmly put up a front for her son as a means of protecting him, not wanting to share too much, or allow him to sense her own growing desperation.  “We do and undo,” Emilie says in voiceover, a poignant reflection on the exasperating cycle of romantic relationships, commonplace tasks, and parent-child attachments.  Taking the path of an objective documentary, the work is a constructed fiction, but more than that it is an autobiographical investigation of self, including precisely motivated moments of reverie that include voluptuous nudity of both sexes, with naked fantasies of her absent husband Tom (Tom Taplin), where the camera lingers on his naked frame, yet she no longer knows what her own body is, and carefully works to rediscover it.  Sabine Mamou has a beauty that is certainly not classic, yet has an irresistible and penetrating charm, with one of the more erotic scenes in cinema, receiving a phone call, but leaves the phone off the hook before moving into the bedroom in the empty home of her employer where she removes her clothes and is seen lying naked on the bed, viewing herself in a mirror, creating a fractured image in the reflection, as she adapts her gaze to her own body, offering a distinctly feminine gaze where there are no ulterior motives.  The naked and distorted image is much like the poetic narration, where words are strung together like pieces of a puzzle in search of some kind of meaning.  This is a Varda film that sneaks up on you, offering a rare glimpse of intimacy, finding herself at a stage in her life when she’s at her saddest and most vulnerable, with no pretense of optimism or happiness, making this one of her more challenging works, suggesting the subject of women is a recent invention in the world of cinema, where critics traditionally have paid too little attention.  A handful of cinematographers were used in this film, just shooting on the weekends, picking up shots and filling it in with this story about a woman we get to observe.  While it’s not flashy by any means, and might even be considered brooding in nature, but it is emotional, told honestly and truthfully, which is the ethos of her work.  Varda has been making radical films for over half a century, and has resisted norms of representation while creating a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, all of which provide insight into broader cultural and political contexts, always rooted in moments of intimacy and tenderness toward the lives she is depicting, yet inexplicably when Cahiers du Cinéma published special editions in 1980 on French cinema two years running, they omitted her entirely.  They included Catherine Breillat, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and others, but Varda was excluded without even a footnote.  It should be pointed out that the French New Wave was nearly exclusively an all-male collective, with their homages and critiques of Hollywood styles and conventions that Varda completely disassociated herself from, making films that never made money and defy categorization, but exhibit far more heart and compassion, DOCUMENTEUR |1981| VOSTFR ~ WebRip Rare - Dailymotion YouTube (4:27).

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Mur Murs

 

Writer/director Agnès Varda

Mathieu Demy and Rosalie Varda

MUR MURS            B                                                                                                              France  USA  (80 mi)  1981  d: Agnès Varda

Whether collective daydreams or personal visions, the walls tell of a city and its people.           —Agnès Varda in her voiceover narration 

Varda had already lived for several years in the United States with her husband Jacques Demy, who was brought to Los Angeles to shoot MODEL SHOP (1969), while Varda visited the Bay area to shoot two documentaries, Uncle Yanco (Oncle Yanco) (1967), Black Panthers (1968), before returning to Hollywood to film Lion's Love (1969).  Captivated by a counterculture movement that fizzled out as quickly as it began, with no coordinated organization to hold it together, she was equally enthralled by the striking murals that decorated Los Angeles, so when she returned to Southern California in 1979, this time on her own, temporarily separated from her husband, she explored what piqued her interest earlier.  Varda frequently resorts to images of landscape, often constructed as an allegory connected to a central character, as in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), yet she engages with the land as a fragile part of an ecosystem, a gendered space, and a powerful symbol of the nation and its patrimony.  Rather than view the landscape as an unbreakable link between the nation and the national past preserved in nature, she frames the natural world as a modern phenomenon in a state of ruin and develops an aesthetic of the landscape attuned to this condition.  While she was fascinated by the glittering façades lining the city, she also felt isolated by an intrusive highway system that encouraged segregation and discouraged any sense of community.  Unlike the hundreds of commercial billboards that litter LA’s urban sprawl (Sunset Strip Billboards - Los Angeles), murals are captivating pieces of street art that tell an alternative story of the city, often highly personal and authentic expressions that are relatable to the communities in which they’re found, providing a colorful backdrop to the daily lives of Angeleno residents from all different backgrounds, while Varda diligently tracks down the artists behind these murals, doing an excellent job of tapping into the hidden stories and struggles behind their unspoken history, coming at a time when little attention was paid to community murals.  Feeling more like her work in the late 60’s, the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, opening in America to a packed Fox Venice Theater where many of the muralists sat in the audience.  This is not the film she intended to make, however, having written a screenplay in 1979 titled Maria and the Naked Man inspired by a news item about police brutality, but never received funding, so it was never made.  Ostensibly a documentary that is as much about the muralists as it is about the murals, originally shot by Nurith Aviv on a 16mm Éclair camera, with a narration provided by Varda, offering her own playfully subjective commentary that allows her to ruminate on themes as images are shown, interweaving the artist’s concerns with her own, like a stream-of-consciousness montage of murals, made in coordination with DOCUMENTEUR (1981), as both films were shot simultaneously, then edited into two distinct films, where they were meant to be seen together as a double bill, though both stand alone on their own merits.  Besides the similar location, the fictionalized follow-up begins where this film leaves off in front of a giant-sized wall image of The Isle of California, (Isle of California - The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad Archive), an apocalyptic vision designed by Terry Schoonhoven, depicting the aftermath of a giant earthquake that eventually separates California from the continent, tapping into the Southern California mindset of that fateful event having an inevitable impact on the future.  Schoonhoven appears before the camera in front of several other notable murals, many of which no longer stand today, yet he offers his own contemplative rationale for doing this kind of work, “The very ephemeral nature of the painting have a lot to do with wanting to do those pieces.  In order to continue doing these murals, you have to accept that they fade, they get mutilated.  That’s part of the beauty of the piece, that fact that it does change.”  The impermanence to the work recalls the ephemeral artwork of environmental landscape sculptor Andrew Goldsworthy (A Look at Nature Artist Andy Goldsworthy), the subject of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s RIVERS AND TIDES (2001).  When you create outdoor art in harmony with the natural world, it has a temporary shelf life, eventually swept away by the winds of time, foreshadowing Varda’s later film Faces Places (Visages Villages) (2017), where a sense of transience mirrors our own mortality.      

From her training as a photographer, Varda developed a taste for documenting the world with a unique talent for inventive composition, and she remains an original, not really modeling her style after anyone.  Her documentaries have been described as films of encounter, examining lives on the margins of society with compassion and curiosity, trying to capture the otherness, the singularity, of the people she meets, where her films are meant to empower other people, connecting the personal with the political, as the murals are a backdrop to the city’s diverse cultures, featuring plenty of shots of graffiti alongside those giant hyperrealistic murals which can be symbolic, political, surreal, neo-realist, and everything all at once.  In her own words, this film is “about Los Angeles, a portrait of the city through what is shown in the street, palm trees and sun and all these murals and everybody expressing themselves.”  Through a series of interviews with artists involved with the paintings, many of them are black and Mexican-American, where the murals are a public dialogue with the past, colorfully telling their own stories in a link to an ethnic history and culture that is largely missing from classrooms in their communities, becoming a tool against oppression and marginalization, and a reflection of their value amidst a society that continually overlooks them.  Sometimes the murals are a product of a business commission, hoping to increase their visibility with engaging, billboard-sized murals that serve as product endorsements, at other times they are personal memorials honoring those who lost their lives to gun violence, yet more often they are non-commercial, highly subjective artistic visions connecting marginalized communities to their cultural heritage, becoming emblems of pride honoring their own history.  Muralist Willie Herrón describes how the near-fatal stabbing of his younger brother led to his infamous painting, The Wall That Cracked Open, a two-story portrait vividly depicting how violence was tearing up Hispanic families, taking 12-hours to complete it, working feverishly through the night at the exact spot of the incident, while Larry Freeman, principal of Willowbrook High School in Compton, employed two of his former students to paint some of the walls and rooms around the school, including the cafeteria where all the students congregate, reflecting the perspectives and visionary art of one of their own.  As the murals appear onscreen, an offscreen male voice whispers the title of the piece and the name of the artist, which is superimposed over Varda’s own narration, an aural experiment that adds to the visual patchwork of collective imagery, where the title is a play on words, as the French word murmure literally means whisper.  During the 70’s, muralism was a full-fledged art movement reaching into every neighborhood of the city, much of it stimulated by government-funded CETA Employment of Artists (1974-1981), bringing about an art revival in a spirit close to the New Deal in the 30’s.  At the time there were hundreds of murals painted by more than 70 muralists, inspired by the Chicano art movement, which can be traced back to the Mexican painting tradition of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, collectively known as Los Tres Grandes, who, between the 1920’s and 1950’s, cultivated a style of Mexican Muralism that defined Mexican identity following The Mexican Revolution (1910–20).  With plenty of public support for these projects, many in housing projects and community arts centers, there was a commitment for multi-ethnic diversity and social change, transforming public spaces to reflect the people who use them, affiliated with grants and outreach programs, so in a sense these communities were re-investing in themselves instead of bowing down to real estate interests.  But this was simply a phase, as real estate profits eventually won out and wiped out much of the mural art.  However, there are some lasting legacies, like The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural designed by Judy Baca, head of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a non-profit community arts center based in Venice, California, who enlisted the aid of more than 400 community youth and artists to design a mural along the Tujunga Wash, a thirteen-foot high concrete drainage wall along a tributary of the Los Angeles River, with a length of 2,754 feet (covering over 6 city blocks), started in 1976 and completed in 1983, credited as one of the longest murals in the world.   

While murals are a public art form, accessible and visible to all, the artists themselves tend to be more anonymous, often lesser-known than their works, where their murals make up for their lack of access into the mainstream art world.  Judy Baca started painting murals because she realized she had never seen a Chicana in an art museum and there would probably be very little opportunity for her to enter the art establishment, while Richard Felix, a Mexican-American muralist who designed 50 murals in the low-income housing complex of Estrada Courts in East Los Angeles, dreamed “of making the biggest open air art gallery in the world.”  Kent Twitchell, a graduate of the prestigious Otis School of Art and Design, where he currently sits on the Board of Trustees, whose towering, multi-story murals have dotted L.A.'s urban landscape for decades, conceived giant, imposing figures looming outside the walls of the unemployment office (curiously coming to life in the film, as the real-life models walk towards the camera filling out their imaginary frames), drawing attention to the plight of the unemployed, while also creating a giant mural covering five floors of a bridal shop, taking five years to complete it, where the owner wanted “something spectacular to announce his business.”  We learn they wanted to charge him for the parking space occupied by the scaffolding, so Twitchell painted exclusively at night when the parking was free.  Some of the images are playful, like a scene of a mural at Venice Beach with young people dancing on roller-skates in front of it, reverberating to the sound of soul music, a surreal setting of kids just having fun, seen collectively moving in and out of the screen, while there are also scenes of Varda interacting with the work, placing cars in front of murals before having them drive away, creating an alternative viewing experience with a whimsical sense of motion, suggesting a time when painters on the streets were providing a freedom of expression that may not exist today.  One of the more memorable images comes from Willie Herrón, a muralist and member of Los Illegals, an American Chicano punk band, seen when they were very young, almost like a boy band, playing their raucous music in an outdoor performance with the LA freeway looming just behind, like a living mural that continually changes shape and form as the cars stream past.  Motion is a hypnotic aspect of a rhythmic dance sequence in front of Margaret Garcia’s larger mural of Two Blue Whales, where the slow motion suggests dancing underwater, combining both artistic elements into one unifying form, ONE FILM / ONE SHOT #19: Mur murs YouTube (1:23).  One unfathomable aspect of the film is the appearance of French actress Juliet Berto, who introduces herself to many of the artists, including Herrón, or simply walks past many of these murals, a recurring motif that feels more set-up than the spontaneity of the rest of the film and eventually gets lost, as she simply disappears, never to be heard from again.  Several murals in the film have been commissioned by a local business to help draw attention to them, where perhaps the most striking is a long mural encircling the Farmer John meatpacking plant, a Southern California staple and official sponsor of the Dodger Dogs sold at Dodger Stadium, where pigs are depicted in various frolicking postures in a wildly idyllic pastoral setting, Farmer John's Hog Wild Mural ~ Vernon, a stark contrast from the assembly line butchery taking place inside the plant.  Les Grimes, a talented painter of scenic backgrounds for Hollywood movie sets, spent 11-years working on the mural before he died in a fall from a fifty-foot scaffolding he was using to paint a portion of the sky, with painter Arno Jordan hired to finish the murals.  In the same way that muralists are marginalized, not an accepted part of art galleries, Varda has faced her own issues of not really being accepted into American or French film establishments, and instead has always been viewed as a perennial outsider, which may have been what actually attracted her to these provocative, larger-than-life artworks and the unrecognized artists who created them.  Despite a forty-year time difference, there is a connection between Varda’s film and Kelly Reichardt’s more recent Showing Up (2022), as both embrace the idea that art draws people together, as it helps build personal connections by expressing a common spirit, a shared sense of identity, becoming a haven for friendship and for working, accentuating the view that creating art helps strengthen the fabric of any community.

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