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| Writer/director Agnès Varda |
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| 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.
Watch Mur murs Full Movie Online Free With English ... entire film available on FshareTV with multiple subtitle options (1:22:18)
