Mur Murs (1980)

Not rated but this one is fairly tame.  While we have stories of sorted pasts, the movie itself seems pretty all ages.  The biggest thing is that, like all art, it should be political.  These are stories of oppression through art.  Similarly, murals tend to have nudity in them, but that's in the realm of art.  There is one guy who seemed to run a gentleman's club.  Also, a worker at a slaughterhouse dropped one of his bloodstained gloves.  So this is me desperately trying to find something to comment on and I didn't succeed.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

Yeah, I'm getting tired about writing about Varda too.  See, the thing about Varda is that I love her and sometimes I can't stand her.  This is one of the times that I love her.  The problem about writing about writing about a movie that I enjoy is that I have a hard time writing about it.  See?  These are very specific problems that I don't really have to deal with, but I face head on anyway.

It's the beginning of the school year, so I'm talking about the categories of film.  The three types of film are fictional narratives, documentaries, and experimental films.  I only had the epiphany recently that Agnes Varda loves all three film styles potentially equally.  I keep talking about how much of a genius that Varda is, but I often find myself frustrated with her more experimental work.  But I realized that, when she's directing narratives or documentaries, she's absolutely destroying, especially when it comes to documentaries like Mur Murs, which should be incredibly difficult to pull off considering that that the topic covered should be dry as toast.  

For those unaware of what Mur Murs is, Agnes Varda in 1980 went around and investigated the murals of Los Angeles.  My buddy back in college made a similar movie, only his was to mock the murals.  We were younger back then and it was probably easier to attack stuff.  Still, I find his documentary funny so I won't apologize for it.  But the thing that Varda makes as the core of her movie is the notion that art has value for a voiceless people.  While not everyone in the documentary is a minority, there seems to be a solidarity of vision when it comes to creating these works of art around the city.  Regardless of execution, it seems these interviews with these mural artists reflect a need to speak about something greater than simply covering a building with wall art.  Even when works are commissioned, the artists seem to have a more grandiose meaning behind their works.  If there's one thing that unifies Agnes Varda as an auteur, it is her need to speak of the value of art in itself.

An idea that spirals out of the many interviews, beyond that of art in relationship to the artist, is the cultural framework of Los Angeles.  I can't help but contextualize Los Angeles as a city of minorities and immigrants.  I say that because Donald Trump has unleashed the National Guard on cities over the past few days and my brain has been innundated with the fact that we are living under a fascist regime right now.  I can't help but watch something like Mur Murs as a historical document of a time when --as bad as race relations were in 1980 --that the federal government wasn't even trying to hide the need to control a people through authoritarian action.  Instead, Mur Murs reminds us that there has been a long history of bigotry and abuse towards different cultures in America.  

This is more a commentary on the documentary format, but there's something incredibly powerful about the use of anecdotal storytelling when it comes to helping us understand a culture as a whole.  I will admit that some of the murals in the movie are less than impressive.  (That's not true about all of them.  The one guy who has a million interviews in this movie made some darned impressive murals.)  But the stories behind these murals, the stories that inspired the creation of these murals, are so heartfelt that it makes the movie worth watching.  There were people in this movie that I was mentally figuring out their age because I would be fascinated to meet some of these people.  I'm mostly talking about the Catholic priest.  I know.  He was the least interesting person interviewed.  But more to my point is that these people seemed like good people.  Okay, the juggler who goes around and evangelizes seemed a little off to me, but you get my point.  What Varda created here was a story about how a city full of a  lot of people still maintained its humanity.  Not only did it maintain a sense of humanity, but it fought through it.  If Varda is all about art and art is political, it also reminds us the smallest actions that we take when speaking about our people is also a political action.

Before I close up on what might be my shortest blog post in a while, I want to thank Varda for one thing.  Part of the pretense is that it imagines that Varda would be omniscient about what Criterion loves to do.  I have to thank Agnes Varda in the year 1980 from the year 2025 for making a movie that takes place at a slaughterhouse, talks about killing pigs, and doesn't actually show it?  I mean, that's Criterion's bread-and-butter, showing how slaughterhouses work.  Nope, Varda's my girl when it comes to that.  I thank her for that. 

Either way, this is a super chill documentary.  I have to watch its follow-up next, Documenteur.  But then I'll finally be able to take a Varda break for a while.