One of the most fascinating and vibrant fields of contemporary language studies falls under the branch of sociolinguistics and is usually referred to by the term “linguistic landscapes”, a simple but effective way of describing one of the most exciting areas of research of the past few decades. This field is built on the principle that it is possible to extract an abundance of information about a population of a particular area (whether a country, city or even small neighborhood) just by the language that appears in these locations. Signs and billboards are usually the subject of the majority of these studies, but we often find that the most insightful information is drawn from engaging with the street art that decorates these locations since it is well-established that art says more about the human condition than any formal writing. Agnès Varda was certainly interested in this concept on a fundamental level, since many of her films focus on luxuriating in the splendor of urban or rural areas, focusing on both the people and their surroundings, extracting meaning in both instances and creating unforgettable portraits in the process. One of a few documentaries she made explicitly on the subject of places is Mur Murs, in which she is accompanied by Juliet Berto to Los Angeles, where the pair spend some time exploring the city, visiting various neighborhoods and engaging with the locals, albeit doing so in the form of looking at the murals that adorn nearly every wall in one of the world’s most famous cities. These conversations form the foundation for one of the esteemed filmmaker’s most poignant and inventive documentaries, a daring leap into the lives of a large group of people as they navigate their lives, all told through the public art viewed by both locals and visitors, showing the different perspectives to the images that many tend to take for granted, but which Varda is insistent represent the most vibrant and moving kind of artistry imaginable. A well-crafted, deeply insightful meditation on culture through the lens of the most intriguing kind of artistry, Mur Murs is an absolute triumph, and one of Varda’s greatest films.

Varda was a filmmaker whose documentaries usually consisted of fragments she pieced together from her visits to various locations. Her modus operandi was usually to venture into various places that took her interest, plunging herself into the culture through engaging with the people who populate a particular area, asking them the simplest questions, and extracting insightful, beautiful answers that ultimately guide the overarching narrative. She was the most compassionate of documentarians, insofar as she only tended to have a rough guideline of what she intended to explore, and instead allowed the subjects to form the film in the process. Mur Murs is unquestionably one of her most freewheeling, charming documentaries. Filmed during the brief period when she took one of her sojourns into the United States (which also featured in other films she made, such as Uncle Yanco and Black Panthers), the film sees the director seeking out a way to tell a story the country, its people and their shared history, through exploring one of the most quintessentially American cities, venturing beyond the glamour of Hollywood (a place she seemingly had very little interest in visiting), and instead focusing on the suburbs and working-class areas, which were subjected to the same stunningly beautiful attention to detail that we would expect from the director. Her fascination with American culture is very prominent throughout Mur Murs, and she constantly draws our attention to the multicultural nature of Los Angeles, a city that contains millions of bespoke stories, her focus being on using a handful of them to craft a broader narrative about this iconic location and the people who would otherwise not be given the chance to have their story told had Varda not found them to be perfectly appropriate subjects for her insightful portrait of America and the people who built it – not necessarily in the sense of the Founding Fathers or those who hold political office or wield any kind of official power, but rather the millions of hardworking individuals that live their lives in obscurity, and are given the chance to share their experiences, consolidating them into history through engaging with Varda and her overtly generous style of filmmaking.

Anyone who has experienced Varda’s work knows that both her personal and professional life was driven by her fervent passions for a few different subjects – art, her family (which would include her beloved cats), people, and exploring the world beyond her own four walls. Mur Murs is a film that combines many of these qualities, particularly in how she emphasizes the importance of art as a unifying factor. A French-Belgian filmmaker venturing to a city such as Los Angeles, where very few of the people she interviews knew her or the work she had made – interestingly, the people in the city that were most likely to be aware of her artistic output are the same people she is not particularly interested in interviewing, and she seemed to relish in the slight obscurity in which she resided when visiting the United States, at least at this point in her career before she was so immensely recognizable. Her focus was on art, and we find the director using this as the channel through which she tries to make sense of the city and its people. Much like linguists in this field tend to believe that it’s possible to use the language sprawled across cities as the most accurate way to derive information about the population of that area, Varda uses art as a way to unpack the various stories that exist in this city. Varda was incredibly cognisant of the importance of recognizing different groups, and her focus shifted towards exploring the stories of the African-American and Latino communities in particular. Despite living in the relatively liberal, open-minded state of California, these people still endured bigotry and biases asserted towards them, and while the film isn’t interested in a heavy-handed, didactic examination of race relations, Varda is far from ignorant towards the reality of what these people continued to face and therefore uses their creativity as a means to examine how they challenge the status quo. All art is inherently political, and every time someone endeavors to express themselves, they are making some kind of social or cultural statement. Mur Murs collects a few dozen of these testimonies and turns them into a beautiful tapestry that pays tribute to these people and their varied experiences.

There was an abundance of thought that went into the crafting of Mur Murs, which is a bold film about the human condition as filtered through discussions around the art different communities produce and the stories that are attached to each one of them. Yet, Varda’s skillfulness is not merely as a storyteller, but also as a visual stylist. Most of her greatest triumphs are those in which the two qualities collide and create something truly magical, which is one of the several reasons she continues to be hailed as one of the most revolutionary filmmakers of her generation. This film is exceptionally well-made, and the simplicity in style is by no means an indication that it does not contain bundles of artistic brilliance. Her documentaries in particular are fascinating in how they rarely follow the same pattern – in some, she inserts herself as part of the narrative (which is the reason why her quartet of late-period documentaries is considered some of her most celebrated and highly personal works), whereas in others she creates something of a distance, which is often an intentional choice designed to convey some kind of meaning. In the case of Mur Murs, she doesn’t appear on screen, but she narrates almost the entire film, which evokes the sense that she recognizes her status as a visitor, someone who isn’t a part of this story but rather a passive observer, offering her insights and relaying the information she learned on this journey, but refusing to participate in how the narrative unfolds. Even Berto only exists to ask a few questions and essentially be Varda’s companion, an additional perspective as an outsider who is intent on exploring this city and engaging with the people who reside within it, producing the artworks that populate the film. It’s a genuinely inventive and daring film, with several moments being some of the finest in the director’s career, such as the scene in which an artist discusses his paintings of unemployed people, the subjects themselves quite literally stepping out of the murals and occupying the entire frame as the artist slowly recedes out of focus. Varda spoke often about her belief that the camera is a pen, used to construct stories in the same as a more traditional writing instrument, and throughout Mur Murs, she pays tribute to these artists through the process of documenting their stories in her unique manner, which prevents the film from ever coming close to being a run-of-the-mill, overly traditional documentary.

Mur Murs is one of Varda’s most daring projects, as well as one of her most strikingly beautiful, and in terms of both form and content, she proved yet again that her grasp on both her artistic vision and her broader understanding of the human condition is truly undeniable. Her work here is incredible – how many other filmmakers can we envision forming an entire documentary around the culture of painting murals, let alone doing so in such a way that proves to be an engaging, compelling examination of not only the importance of artistic expression, but a bold and insightful exploration of culture, particularly amongst marginalized groups that the director gave a platform long before these kinds of intimate, thorough cultural accounts were commonplace. Mur Murs is a masterpiece of not only documentary filmmaking but of capturing the smallest intricacies of the human condition as a whole. The intimacy with which Varda captures the lives of these people, coupled with their willingness to share their experiences with a director whose primary intention is to weave as thorough a tapestry of this city and its occupants as she could. The results are exquisite – a quiet, resilient, and beautifully-crafted tribute to Los Angeles, as seen through the eyes of an outside observer who is most drawn to the art that covers nearly every wall in these neighborhoods. One of the subjects remarks on how there was an attempt to turn Los Angeles into the biggest art gallery in the world, and if we adjust our perspective, that is exactly what this film is attempting to portray. It is a celebration of art and culture, and a beautiful, ambitious expression of humanity, as seen by someone whose compassion and artistic vision intermingle to create a striking, ambitious masterpiece that is as bold as it is welcoming.