Breaking Down the Walls in Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs (1981) and Visages Villages (2016)

Abstract

What do images ask of the future, and what promises do we owe them? Reading Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs and Visages Villages with Derrida’s archive and de Certeau’s city-writing in mind, I treat Varda’s walls as contested palimpsests. Film overwrites and counter-inscribes surfaces, yet it keeps undertexts legible. I set aside Michael Cramer’s divide between community murals and externally authored photomurals; rather than framing them as opposed projects, the films share one practice: collective inscription, archival method, shifting temporal sense. In Mur Murs, Varda’s camera lets living people eclipse their monumental doubles and turns trompe-l’œil and hushed voices into layers of the palimpsest that refuse closure. In Visages Villages, the larger-than-life portrait of the last remaining inhabitant of a former mining town and the colossal figures of dockworkers’ wives recenter overlooked lives while keeping their impermanence in view. Across both films, cinema becomes the archivable surface: framing, montage, and projection “write” the wall, preserving disappearance even as each screening adds a new layer. Varda practices a careful ethics of remembering that remains future-facing, aware of institutions, and shaped by reality, yet always keeping the walls of stucco, metal, glass, and rock open to re-reading and re-inscription.

1. The Archive and the Promise of the Future

“It is not a question of a concept dealing with the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Derrida 1996, p. 36).

What do images ask of the future, and what promises do we owe them? With Derrida’s emphasis on promise and responsibility in mind, Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs (Varda 1981) and Visages Villages (Varda and JR 2017) stage the archive not as a warehouse of the already-seen but as a palimpsest of traces that binds viewers to responsibility. This promise to the future is not abstract; it is made and felt on specific surfaces. In Varda’s two films, memory is made on material surfaces: stucco walls, corrugated metal, or paper. These are living supports where inscriptions accrue, fade, and return, reminding us that contemporary remembrance is inseparable from the tangible trace, the act of recording, and the visibility of the image.

The material archive meets an institutional archive in the films’ afterlife. In practice, the institutional archive is made by the gatekeepers of memory, such as awards, festivals, distributors and museums, whose praise and selection help to recirculate and relabel words. Agnès Varda was awarded an Honorary Palme d’Or at the Festival de Cannes in 2015, a distinction granted to filmmakers not previously recognized by the festival, and Varda was the first woman to receive one (DeRoo 2017, p. 1). “Varda’s remarks expressed gratitude for a “palme of resistance and endurance.”… Whereas the festival attempts to gloss over obstacles with the prize and its narrative, Varda makes them visible with her statement” (DeRoo 2017, p. 5). Later, in the United States, the visibility of Agnès Varda’s work was raised when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Varda an Honorary Oscar in 2017, again, the first woman director to receive that distinction. In addition, her film Visages Villages, co-written and directed with artist JR, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017, making her the oldest living director ever nominated for an Oscar. Read within a palimpsest framework, these honors function as new inscriptions within Hollywood’s official archival memory of Varda’s work. While Varda’s work has been studied by academics for over four decades, the Academy’s late recognition and honors are additional ‘writings’ on top of the pasted portraits and the spliced images, keeping her face in circulation long after the awards, lights, and walls fade away.

These institutional inscriptions do not only affect public memory, but they also shape how scholars frame Varda’s work. As her work moves from marginal to canon, recent criticism proposes divergent accounts of what the walls do and for whom. To situate my argument, I briefly engage a recent reading in order to mark my departure. An important article to note is Michael Cramer’s “Walls of Cinema: Murals, Medium, and Community in Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs (1981) and Visages Villages (2016)” (Cramer 2024). I want to contrast my approach to Cramer’s because we are both looking at the same two films and drawing different conclusions about the metaphor of the “wall” within each film. Cramer compares the two films because they both depict artists and murals but concludes that the two films are more different than alike. Cramer treats the murals in Mur Murs as community-authored, largely from the Chicano community. The muralists were artists excluded from official art worlds, who organized collective projects to address a communal framework rather than isolated individuals. Cramer frames them as explicitly political images of ongoing struggle and historical memory. On the other hand, he sees the murals in Visages Villages as externally authored photomurals that mainly privilege the individual over the collective struggle. Where there may be some overlap with my stance is how we view the temporal layering of the film onto the murals. Cramer states “[b]oth deal, albeit in different ways, with the ephemeral. Both are at once images and objects the wall or the celluloid support), signs of memory but also of future forgetting, as we know that the walls will crumble and the film will turn to vinegar. … Taken together, the two films create a kind of historical narrative, not simply one of the merciless march of capital after ‘the end of history’ but rather one about media as historical forms, whose own fate is closely tied to the fate of human collectives more broadly and ultimately to the many ‘ends’ that are often said to have marked the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (p. 259). Unlike Cramer, who reads the Visages Villages murals as externally authored, depoliticized gestures where time replaces politics as the main antagonist, I treat the wall as a contested palimpsest in which film actively overwrites, counter-inscribes, and keeps undertexts legible for communal re-reading. On this reading, Mur Murs and Visages Villages are not opposed moments but two movements of the same palimpsestic operation: collective inscription, archival techniques, shifting temporal meanings. Recent scholarship situates Varda’s work within a broader conversation about archive, space, and collective inscription. Michel de Certeau reads walking through an urban space as a mode of writing. Jacques Derrida sees the archive as contested space of law that points toward the future. Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, in their own way, frame memory and narrative as layered acts of reading. Paula Amad emphasizes the counter-archive, which preserves the ephemeral beyond institutional control. My analysis builds on these theoretical frameworks where memory, material walls, and new interpretations continually overwrite one another.

2. Archive and City-Writing: Reading the Wall

With this distinction in view, having named the institutional and archival layers of public policy, commissioning, curating, and circulation of images, I return to the walls themselves, and then to the theoretical frame that clarifies why I treat the wall as a contested palimpsest. There, we see that the heart of Varda’s and JR’s project lies with the people and places themselves. Visages Villages celebrates the everyday French citizen, worker, and villager by transforming their images into giant murals in unusual places. Many of these people and places would be overlooked or forgotten if not for these murals inscribing their presence onto various walls or surfaces, even temporarily. While JR writes on the wall with his murals, Agnes Varda writes the wall with her film. The result is a co-authored palimpsest in which the cinematic layer overwrites and preserves the mural at once, keeping the wall legible long after the mural peels and disappears. In Varda’s work, this practice of inscription began long before Visages Villages when Agnès Varda made five documentaries in California, most in the Los Angeles area, from 1969 to 1981. Her film Mur Murs connects her intimately with the city of Los Angeles and the murals that showcase acts of resistance in the public sphere. Taken together, the two films reveal a consistent method. In them, walls become palimpsests that provide space to create, to remember, to challenge the establishment, to layer meaning upon meaning, however unstable.

Walls within cities have an inherently palimpsest nature with the layers of memory painted, etched, plastered, paved, cemented, and girded over. Varda’s two films add an additional layer of meaning by inscribing the memory of fading and crumbling walls onto film. A film “writes” the wall through framing, montage, color-grading, voiceover, captions, and sound. In addition, when film is projected onto a wall or screen, it temporarily overwrites prior layers without physically erasing them, and we see the walls in the film take on new meaning as it is projected. Finally, a filmed wall circulates to distant audiences at different times, and each new viewing becomes a new context that keeps earlier meanings partially active while adding fresh ones. All these layers of meaning appear in and become the essence of Mur Murs and Visages Villages, creating a rich palimpsest. By “palimpsest,” I refer to two related operations. First, there is a palimpsest where a later inscription effaces the under-text, functionally canceling it. Second, there is a layered writing that keeps the earlier layer, which becomes partially legible and invites re-reading over time. This is what Sarah Dillon calls “palimpsestuous” (Dillon 2007). My analysis of the walls in Varda’s films and their relation to them is contingent on this distinction. In these films, the norm is palimpsestuous co-presence where film “writes” the wall through framing, montage, and protection, overlaying fresh meaning without erasing the earlier layer. At the same time, the films sometimes stage a true effacement, as in the Asco scene in which the camera records the destruction and recirculates as history. I therefore use both senses of palimpsest, but the films’ ethics lean toward layered legibility rather than total cancellation, an archive that overwrites and preserves.

To understand what a palimpsest is in Varda’s film, I will give a brief and selective overview of the palimpsest, memory, the city, the archive, and their uses in this analysis. Following Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, the walls in Varda’s film can be seen as dialogic spaces where multiple voices, from artists and subjects to viewers, overlap without silencing one another. Each layer of the mural, wall and film functions as an utterance that responds to and anticipates the next one, generating an open conversation across time (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981)1. Theorists of everyday practice, like Michel de Certeau, treat the art of walking, tagging, and observing the city as tactics to write the city against itself, whereas theorists of the archive, like Jacques Derrida, account for how institutions and laws shape what can be remembered. Both will be helpful in clarifying why Varda’s walls do not just hold images, but rather actively organize what can be remembered, what can be seen, and how communities can continue to re-inscribe themselves over time.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1984) argues that walkers in a city are the writers of the text as they meander through the streets, turning, crossing and maneuvering through the urban planned and grid-like structure of a modern city, like New York City, that is meant to erase the messy past and impose an organized, structured text (de Certeau 1984, p. 91). Walking becomes an act of writing as walkers negotiate relations with places and movement. The walker connects the concept of the city with the practical, lived city. Graffiti tags, posters, and wear patterns in the sidewalks become inscriptions contrasted against the official plans and monuments, yet these texts are unrecorded and ephemeral because they are continually overwritten. De Certeau likens them to legends and wordless archives of the city. In this sense, a city, according to de Certeau, is a constant living palimpsest that has no final “print” because it is continually subverted and rewritten by the handwriting of walkers. This idea of the unending rewriting of the text will be picked up in Varda’s films, where she shows murals painted on city and building walls, only to be painted over, erased, vandalized, restored, and never finalized. Agnès Varda’s roaming camera in Mur Murs and the road-movie in Visages Villages literalize de Certeau’s claim by staging the movement in the films. JR’s mobile camera-truck will itself “write the city,” as it detours through industrial sites and neighborhoods and becomes the transit for the casual encounters with residents. The camera truck captures the residents’ images and prints them in large scale. Varda and JR do not simply find surfaces. They compose pathways that make the surfaces speak, turning routes into sentences and stops into punctuation. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the modern city also shed light on Varda’s cinematic walls. Like a flaneur reading the “text” of the city, Varda translates urban surfaces and reveals them to be repositories of memory, where fragments of the lived experience endure as traces (Benjamin 1999).2

In a similar way to de Certeau’s city, in Archive Fever, Derrida (1996) redefines the archive as a site where place and law converge. Etymologically, “the meaning of ‘archive’… comes from the Greek arkheion,” (p. 2) the house of the archons who both guard and interpret what is deposited. Derrida calls this privileged place a “topology”: “They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege. At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority, a sense of domiciliation becomes at once visible and invisible” (p. 3). Derrida further explains that the archive is a place of tension between memory and forgetfulness because the act of deciding what, how and where materials should be archived is a powerful act of choosing what will be remembered and what will be lost. Derrida makes a pivotal statement when he says, “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future” (p. 17). The archive is not neutral in its ability to store material because the structure of the archive informs how the content will be engaged. Consequently, the archive is not chiefly about the past but “a question of the future…The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never” (p. 36). So, for Derrida, control over archives is a political and powerful act, because they are our access to and interpretation of the past. They remain decisive and controversial. In her films, Varda exposes the property owners, city agencies, and local customs, which function like archons, authorizing or refusing inscriptions.

Building on Derrida’s distinction between archival law and authority, Paula Amad reframes cinema as a counter-archive, a method of resisting institutional control by preserving ephemeral everyday events as the “history of the present” (Amad 2010, p. 4). Her framework sheds light on how Varda’s films counter the institutional gatekeeping that Derrida describes by re-inscribing the ephemeral images into collective memory. In this regard, Varda’s films act as another layer in the palimpsest archive because her films stage archives on vulnerable surfaces—the walls. As an archivable surface, the wall shapes what can be written, stored, or erased. A wall in wet fresco, a plaster surface primed for mural, or a concrete span receptive to aerosol and buffing each determines what will be “archivable” there. The wall’s durability, visibility, and vulnerability are always subject to censorship, destruction, or cleaning as part of the meaning-making. In addition, when the filming of the wall becomes the final archive, the film captures the ephemeral essence of the wall, allowing us to remember the forgotten images ravaged by time and space, archiving them for the future.

Chip Colwell pushes the palimpsest further by proposing a palimpsest theory of objects (Colwell 2022). In his theory, artifacts are not static bearers of a single meaning but media that bear “a constant tension and interplay between the addition and subtraction of meanings in a text, landscape, or object” (p. 4). In a like manner, I read the walls in Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs and Visages Villages as surfaces where meanings accrue, are scraped away, and remain partially legible. Thus, the wall and the film together stage Colwell’s “constant tension and interplay” of addition and subtraction, with prior traces still partially active. Mur Murs makes this apparent when community images are painted for local purposes, then tagged, restored or recontextualized by new inhabitants. By filming the artists and their murals, Varda’s editing adds yet another layer, juxtaposing voices and murals so that no single layer is definitive. In Visages Villages the same tension is accelerated. JR and Varda intentionally create giant, short-lived portraits; so, their disappearance is born in conversation alongside their birth. The film acknowledges that the vulnerabilities are not failures but one of the ways meaning stays alive in a public space, or as Colwell states the “dual process of inscription and erasure affects collective memories” (p. 132).

Lastly, I draw on Kimberly A. Powell’s research (Powell 2008). She examines the figurative concept of the palimpsest as a way to analyze how built spaces embody social, cultural, and historical narratives: “Post-structural uses of the term [palimpsest] have underscored palimpsest as a metaphor for the re-inscription and legibility of discourses situated within institutional power structures, and for the reexamination of subjectivity” (Powell 2008, p. 7). This formulation explains Varda’s choice of subjects and supports. Varda and her collaborators write counter images onto facades controlled by landlords, municipalities, port authorities, and heritage regimes, making legible the “discourse situated within institutional power structures” (p. 7). By counter image, I mean inscriptions that interrupt the dominant visual order of the wall. They overlay rather than erase the prior layer, asserting a competing claim to public memory while keeping the undertext legible. Powell applies a palimpsestuous reading, a term borrowed from Sarah Dillon to a visual ethnographic course in El Chorillo, Panama City, to bring out the lived experience missing from schematic maps. A “palimpsestuous” reading is “an inventive process of creating relations where there may, or should, be none” (p. 7). Varda constructs similar projects in these two films, treating walls as living archives anchored in their communities, making the lived experience legible and durable on film. The films do not only catalog murals and place portraits, but they also invent relations across times and places that might otherwise remain unrelated. With that institutional layer (the film archive) in mind, the task is to read the counter images on their original supports to show how the wall’s palimpsest holds memory, loss, and resistance in tension.

Read this way, Mur Murs is not simply a catalog of Los Angeles murals but a film that makes visible the city’s social authorship and then preserves and re-circulates that authorship through the techniques of cinema. Varda’s love for the neighborhood voices, for the materiality of paint on stucco, and for the slow destruction of images under the sun and under policy composes a palimpsest that can be read and re-read across time and place, with each new screening adding a layer of meaning without erasing the last. In Visages Villages, when the image of Guy Bourdin dissolves in sea spray, the film inscribes both the presence and disappearance at once (00:59:40–01:00:26). The construct of this ‘archive,’ that is the paper, glue, rock face, the camera, projector, wall and film, determine which memories endure and which ones disappear. Varda’s style is the ethics of fragile memory. She counters forgetting by layering the infrastructure of film onto vanishing spaces.

Alongside the civic archive, Varda authorizes and preserves her own place by writing with film and staging a “self-archive.” From the opening of Mur Murs, where her voice overwrites the Los Angeles “talking, murmuring and wailing” walls, to the scene in Visages Villages, where she retrieves an image from one of her earlier films and stages a mural on a seaside bunker that both saves and changes the image, she inscribes herself into spaces often occupied by other voices. In these two films, we see that Varda rewrites history while keeping prior strata visible. Her remark “by filming murals, I filmexist” (Rachmuhl 2009, p. 8), names a self-archival practice. This aligns with Paula Amad’s analysis of film’s counter-archive: “at the core of film’s counter-archival record of reality was its attraction to the everyday fragment as the history of the present” (Amad 2010, p. 4). For Varda, the counter-archive culminates in the self-archive, an instance captured on film so that one’s presence endures in the historical record.

3. Mur Murs: Palimpsests in Public

I want to first look at Mur Murs. The film captures many murals from the 1980s in Los Angeles, from Boyle Heights and Ramona Gardens to Venice Beach. Many murals depict the pride of place and heritage of the Chicanos living in Ramona Heights, while others are painted to amuse and bewilder the spectator. The walls represent the cultural landscape inscribed with heritage and history. Varda spoke with artists such as Judy Baca, Kent Twitchell, Willie Herron, Terry Schoonhoven, Arthur Mortimer, Harry Gamboa Jr., the group Asco, and many others. In each case, the artist proudly explained the motivation behind each mural. At the same time, some lamented the lack of space and representation in art for Chicanos, and others lamented the already degraded image of the mural. Judy Baca created a moving mural that toured the city, bringing meaning and representation in each new location. Varda’s film captures both the finished and ongoing process of mural creation. The film’s audience is confronted with a multi-faceted image of Los Angeles murals, neighborhoods, and cultures, some of which no longer exist, creating layers of past, present, and future. Agnès Varda’s memory-laden act of inscribing the ephemeral, intentionally filming these fading walls, turns them into veritable palimpsests of meaning.

In the film’s opening scenes, Varda narrates the documentary as the camera pans across a mural. She says:

“Moi, à Los Angeles, j’ai surtout vu des murs. Tout d’abord des graffitis, beaux comme des peintures signées par des dizaines d’anonymes sur les murs longs comme des serpents mythiques. C’était le début d’une découverte, pleine de plaisir et de surprises, celles des murs peints. On dit « murals » en américain. Je les appelle mural. Mural comme mur vivant, mur vital, mur moral. Mural comme mur parlant, mur murmurant. Mural comme un mur râle, l’autre pas” (Mur Murs 00:02:19–00:03:05).3

Our first glimpse of a mural is like a scraped manuscript, a palimpsest, where the wall keeps prior signatures of anonymous artists as ghosted layers under new paint. She calls the graffiti as “beaux comme des peintures” mixing unofficial and official art designations, which resists a single, stable author. She describes the nature of the wall as “vivant, vital, moral” reinforcing the ever-changing, never-finished record of artists. The words “mural comme mur parlant, mur murmurant…un mur râle, l’autre pas” reinforce the idea that there is a chorus of layered voices, some amplified, others suppressed. The varying degrees of voices echo the varying degrees of legible and faint traces of the palimpsest. Right at the outset of the film, this quote establishes Los Angeles walls as living archives, and sites where power relations accumulate, some visible, some buried. Varda overlays her French voice on a Los Angeles mural, establishing the palimpsest motif of the mural covered in graffiti of many community members, overlayed with Varda’s narration and finally our viewing.

This concept is very evidently displayed in the scene with muralist Kent Twitchell, whose unemployment office façade becomes a space where gender and belonging are tested. Twitchell painted giant images of other individual artists on the wall of a twenty-foot building of an unemployment office. He states in the film, “large paintings have a tendency, if done properly, to humble people” (Mur Murs 00:11:20). He portrayed four male artists, a “gang of men,” in the middle, who seem a little scary and represent the established artist, and two “more sensible” female artists on either side, a little further off and slightly smaller. The women, stable, secure, and outside, are protecting the flanks. Twitchell states that “women are outsiders as artists” (Mur Murs 00:11:51) and he reflects that in his mural. Standing several yards in front of the mural, Twitchell describes his mural while the actual artists depicted in the mural, wearing the same clothes as in the mural, slowly approach Twitchell and the camera. As they move to the foreground, their physical bodies eventually eclipse their painted figure on the wall. Twitchell says that the large scale on the wall is to portray the importance of the artist in the world, and as we watch the artists take over their image on the wall, we are aware that Varda wants to collapse the hierarchy between the monumental image and the living person. She shows that the mural’s story, including its gendered placement, is only one version, and that cinema can let the subjects step out, reclaim, and even overwrite the way they have been framed. The living figures write a new layer over the painted one; the earlier image remains visible but revised by the people it represents. Because she films as a woman and an outsider to Los Angeles, she refuses the mural’s masculinist monumentality. By allowing the living artists to overtake their painted doubles, she shows that the image is negotiable, authorship is shared, and those labeled “outsiders” can step into the foreground and rewrite what the wall declares.

Another instance of intentional layering is the Brandelli’s Brig mural scene. The mural depicts the Brandelli couple standing in front of their bar called Brandelli’s Brig, painted on the outside wall of the bar. As Sophie Rachmuhl (2009) notes: “the whole film relies on trompe l’oeil, a technique playing on visual illusion first associated with the Italian Renaissance, and masterfully illustrated in Mur Murs by Terry Schoonhoven and Arthur Mortimer, whose mural “Brandelli’s Brig,” made for a bar owner, adds an extra layer of illusion when Varda has the people portrayed pose in front of the mural which, in the words of the artist is ‘a mural inside a mural inside a mural’” (p. 10). In addition to this, the live Betty Brandelli stands in front of the mural of her husband and herself, posing as she does in the mural. She introduces herself and explains how the mural was conceived. Suddenly, Varda adds Arthur Mortimer’s explanation of the mural as a jump cut into the scene, creating a jarring effect, without transition or explanation. If you look at his T-shirt, you will see that it says, “The Lynn Carey Band.” This is a reference to a mural from an earlier scene where Lynn Carey sits in front of her own image (00:36:30–00:37:34). Then, in front of the Brandelli’s Brig mural, we see Arthur Mortimer holding a drawing of himself standing in front of the Brandelli’s mural, where the mise en abyme effect is amplified (Mur Murs 01:10:13). At the same time, Mortimer explains his art, while holding his art in front of his art. He is fascinated by how the ordinary can become strange in artwork, how a mirror image can cause people to stop and think about what they are seeing. Then, as Betty is told she is no longer needed, the camera captures her voice asking for her jacket and glasses. As she is walking away, Arthur tells her to “have a nice time” and you can hear a faint male voice murmuring, “My friend Randy Robison, so what do you think of this mural, here? It’s the same person that is on the mural” (Mur Murs 01:10:21).

What is the effect of this diegetic conversation that has been captured in this scene? Similarly to the trompe l’oeil effect of the artist holding a picture of the mural in front of the mural, the off-camera voice is questioning what we see while we watch it, causing us to question whether this should be in the film. Just like the muralist Arthur Mortimer who wanted the passer-by to stop and ponder the reality in his mural, Varda asks us to consider what constitutes a documentary film. By adding more depth to the images with the diegetic sound, Varda questions where daily life ends and art begins. According to Rachmuhl “Agnès Varda wants to make those walls speak not as objects but as subjects” (Rachmuhl 2009, p. 8). Furthermore, we know that the moment, the unscripted interaction among the people on screen, the doubling of the artist and mural, and the audio overlay exist only and forever in this film. This idea is doubled with Betty Brandelli’s explanation of the real-life loss of her husband pictured in the mural. At the time of the filming, he only existed on the wall. Every idea, image and sound in this scene is doubled or even tripled, creating a palimpsest of meaning. As Mathias Barkhausen argues in “The Varda Vue in California: The Poetics of Cinema in Mur Murs & Documenteur,” the image reaches a limit and the camera can only show what is outwardly present: “[F]ilm-specific devices such as voice-over or non-synchronous sound can get past this to create an idea of life. In this respect, play between fiction and fact can be identified as the media-specific characteristics of the art form…Walls, like cinema, are places of encounter, bringing together fantastic things and people as well as those taken from reality” (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Barkhausen 2023, para. 6). Thus, sound anchors the murals in a lived environment, layering testimony, ambient noise, and music over the picture. The film becomes an ethnographic archive of overlapping and unstable testimonies. Varda turns the mural into a living palimpsest where presence and absence, voice and erasure, ordinary and monumental, all coexist. Instead of fixing meaning, she exposes how every cultural artifact is made of unstable strata that demand re-reading.

In “A Palimpsest Theory of Objects,” Chip Colwell states, “we need to see objects as more than their last inscribed meaning, to illuminate the histories of meanings embedded within them. In other words, we must explicitly add the dimension of time to objects” (Colwell 2022, p. 134). In relation to location, time and temporality, Varda describes the group Asco’s “happening” as it relates to murals in this scene. Varda uses their actions in this moment to question the status of the mural. She states: “Willie Herrón et ses amis se confrontent au temps avec une impatience qui vient de l’enfance et une rage qui vient de la raza. Il peint un mur le temps d’un weekend et y invente un spectacle. Faire vite, faire non-sens et défaire encore plus vite sans le sujet et le sens même de ce « happening. » On ne sait s’ils veulent contester l’idée du mural et se confronter au mur ou s’ils veulent au contraire y entre et s’y coller pour toujours. Le groupe s’appelle Asco, ce qui veut dire nausée en espagnol …Tout finit en poussière et en déchets broyés par des mécaniques. Tout disparaît, y compris certains murals” (Mur Murs 01:14:20–01:16:40).4

In this scene, by filming the “happening” and capturing it forever, Varda deconstructs the very idea of a semi-spontaneous event, that is not to be repeated. Varda remarks on the aspect of time and murals and wonders if the group Asco is challenging the idea of a mural and the wall or becoming a part of it forever. The film audience must consider that by posing this question about Asco, Varda is in fact asking us the very same question as we watch. What does it mean to confront the wall or to become part of it? Anyone familiar with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre might recognize a subtle nod to his early existential works, “The Wall” and “Nausea,” where themes of existence and the accidental nature of life and death abound. In the clip, Harry Gamboa Jr. asks the audience, “Why are we burning ourselves? We shall… tend to go layer by layer and destroy our own history and create from the ashes” (Mur Murs 01:15:50–01:16:00). Gamboa refers to the process of rebirth, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. When Gamboa says we “burn ourselves… layer by layer,” Asco models a de Certeau-like tactic of urban writing, destroying one stratum to create another, a phoenix logic the film records and intensifies. If the wall, or the murals in this film represent a past time and place, by capturing them on film, Varda is herself challenging the wall and its decaying nature because she has immortalized these images forever. Varda implicates the audience in meaning-making through this palimpsestuous process of reviewing the film. Varda’s question, confront the wall or become part of it, is addressed to us. Each viewing inscribes another layer, carrying the murals forward while changing them. Varda refuses its fixity, building instead a living archive where every return is also a revision.

In one of the final murals of the film, another muralist named Terry Schoonhoven acknowledges the inherent difficulty and ephemeral nature of painting murals. He says “in order to accept these murals, you have to accept that they fade, they get mutilated. That is part of the beauty of the piece, the fact that it changes. It is a take-it-or-leave-it situation. It is either that or going back to working within the system” (Mur Murs 01:18:40–01:19:12). He is referring to the fact that some of his murals have been covered by other walls or parking lots. He prefers this vitality of change, however, to works of art that hang statically in museums. One of his murals is a mirror image of the corner opposite the mural, but not an exact mirror image. The difference is that the mural is devoid of people, while people inhabit this area in real life. The passers-by inscribe themselves onto the mural, keeping the scene open to new interpretations. Despite the emptiness of the mural, Schoonhoven claims that this is not an apocalyptic image, even though “the murals have evolved themes of prediction or apocalyptic visionary kinds of things” (Mur Murs 01:20:22–32). So, this final mural of the film reads less like an ending and is more open to a reading of what is to come. Openness is the quality that allows layers to accumulate without sealing the surface. The wall remains an open archive oriented towards the future, with counter-images of resistance peeking through.

4. Visages Villages: Portraits at Scale and Impermanence

Openness is also a condition of the chance encounters in Visages Villages that drive the film. In 2016, towards the end of her career, Agnès Varda teamed up with JR, an installation artist of large photographs. They went into rural France to photograph the people and install larger-than-life photos of the people they encounter onto the wall-like surfaces. These images are simultaneously epic and somber as the temporality of the image is constantly underscored. Some are installed on walls of shipping containers destined for other lands. Some on the moving walls of train cars, while another is installed on a giant beach rock battered by the incoming tide. JR and Varda visit small villages across France and interact with the inhabitants of the town, or the workers in factories and small businesses, in a very personal way. Then, JR and Varda devise a project to recognize the local people and select a space, typically a wall, that would bring meaning to the location. Because what we see in the film is the artistic process, Varda engages us in a way that increases our sensibility to the link between place and art. In her article “Visages Villages: Documenting Creative Collaboration,” Conway (2019) states that “Visages Villages extends Varda’s longstanding preoccupation with the power of place, but also stages encounters that raise questions about the function of art and the nature of collaboration” (p. 23). I want to draw your attention to a few powerful scenes where collaboration acts as scenes of resistance through palimpsestuous work. According to Powell (2008), “palimpsestuous reading is an inventive process of creating relations where there may, or should, be none” (p. 7). With Conway’s attention to place and Powell’s ‘palimpsestuous’ relationship in mind, the walls in the film become legible pages. This becomes very clear when Varda and JR meet Jeanine and use her wall for collaboration.

One of the most powerful collaborations in Visages Villages was with Jeanine, a miner’s daughter who was the last remaining resident of a miner’s community which was slated to be destroyed. Jeanine recounts her stories to Varda and JR as she leans out the window of her brick house, recalling a simpler time. Jeanine says the memories of her home are too numerous for her to leave. After listening to the tales of Jeanine’s family and the rest of the mining community, Varda and JR decide to plaster images of the long-gone miners on the walls of the house that they used to inhabit. However, on Jeanine’s house, they paste her larger-than-life, defiant image that seems to dare anyone to tear down her home. Agnès and JR call Jeanine “la résistante”—the resistant. When Jeanine sees herself on the wall, she begins to cry. Varda replies, “Jeanine, c’est pas triste! On est des amies maintenant. On a voulu vous faire un hommage”(Visages Villages 00:11:44–52).5 Whereas all the other images of miners testify to a bygone era of hard work and suffering, Jeanine’s image is one of eternal resistance and friendship. Jeanine’s house becomes a literal and temporal palimpsest: wheatpaste on brick, testimony on image, film on event. The giant portrait turns facade into face, recentering a working-class woman as the keeper of place-memory and converting a doomed row of homes into a counter-monument whose power is precisely its fragility.

As the camera pans the length of the houses one by one, Jeanine appears inside the doorframe of her house, looking at mail, dwarfed by her own image. This palimpsestuous wall testifies that Varda has championed women and the overlooked people of the world. Varda later remarks that she thinks of Jeanine often and wonders how long she can remain in her house, further implying that this creative collaboration had lasting effect on the artist. Varda’s camera work makes a living archive where each viewing writes a new layer over the last, sustaining Jeanine’s resistance even as the wall decays.

JR and Varda undertake another co-created project in the abandoned village Pirou-Plage. This vacation village was never finished nor inhabited, and the houses, covered in graffiti, remain in a state of ruin. JR and Varda’s idea is to plaster the images of residents from the surrounding areas to transform the village. As JR tells them, “Nous, on essaie d’animer, d’habiter, de ré-habiter un endroit où la vie a un peu disparu, avec des visages, avec un peu d’énergie, au moins même si ce n’est que pour un journée” (Visages Villages 00:37:20–29).6 JR’s message here is that art reinvigorates spaces, even dead and dilapidated spaces. In this same scene, Varda later tells them that “Ce serait bien si vous découpiez vos visages, et une fois collés, ils seront plus près les uns des autres” (Visages Villages 00:37:41).7 The Pirou-Plage mural project reveals two methods and approaches of the different artists. On the other hand, by cutting out the dead space in the image, Varda’s message is that palimpsestuous art is a process of manipulation, juxtaposition, and layering over time. Together, the two artists transform Pirou-Plage into a social image, with JR bringing life back and Varda reducing the distance between people, so that the wall becomes a site of co-creation as well as resistance.

In addition to the installation of their faces on the walls, the villagers stand, squat and lean next to the walls and peer through the windows. One woman even asks a postman, “Est-ce que vous avez une letter pour moi?”8 The postman responds “yes” and hands her a letter “N” or perhaps “Z”—it is hard to tell which way the letter goes (Visages Villages 00:39:16–35). Being able to receive a letter confers addressability and belonging. The postman’s “delivery” of a “letter” relates to the archive’s instability. Messages are repeatable and misdirectable. Yet, the place becomes addressable, legible as a living palimpsest, enlivened by art, sustained by film, and always open to the next inscription.

The projects with Jeanine and the village at Pirou-Plage are retrospective installations, bringing memories into the present. Varda and JR also created images that are introspective and new by forming walls where there are none. For one special mural, JR brings Agnès to Le Havre to visit the dock and the men who helped JR with a past project. Varda bemoans the fact that the shipyard is not a village and that there are no women there. So, she asks to speak to the wives of three dock workers. Varda and JR emblazon the full-body images of these three women onto shipping containers stacked seven containers high and eleven wide. The wives of the dock workers tower above and invade this all-male space. Varda explains: “L’idée c’est que vous soyez comme trois grandes statues, trois totems, comme ça, qui rentrent dans ce monde d’hommes, et qui s’installent” (Visages Villages 01:11:06).9 To which one of the women responds, “Être à l’honneur pour une fois” (Visages Villages 01:11:17).10 When the husbands were asked what they thought of the project, one responded “Je pense que ça dépasse la fierté, qu’en fait, tout cette implication… voilà, c’est toujours plus. En fait, on avance, on avance par rapport à des clichés qui existent” (Visages Villages 01:14:51–01:15:04).11 This recognizes the role reversal taking place on the dock. During the unveiling, each woman climbs into an open container aligned with her printed body, sitting inside her own image several stories up, while her husband stands on the ground directly beneath the corresponding portrait. To create new meaning, Varda and JR have brought together contradictory images as metaphors for change: containers become walls, masculine becomes feminine, movement becomes stillness. This staging turns the container stack into a mobile, gendered archive. A woman becomes part of a wall of her own monumental image, supported by her partner below, all of it recorded by the camera. While we know this is only temporary because the containers must eventually be filled and shipped, Varda and JR challenge clichés in the most unlikely places.

Throughout the film, we witness two artists’ visions of the world, both artistically and literally. The literal is highlighted by Agnès’s struggle with her macular degeneration, causing her to see blurry images, and by the fact that JR never removes his sunglasses. Agnès’s trip to the hospital for an eye procedure becomes a focal point in the film. In this scene, we learn how Agnès sees the world and how she copes with her failing eyesight. Rather than this becoming a sad moment in the film, the two directors turn it into a philosophical contemplation on the nature of sight and vision. JR declares to her “En fait, tu vois flou et tu es contente” Varda responds, “Et toi, tu vois tout foncé et tu es content” (Visages Villages 00:36:01–00:36:05).12 Varda’s declining sight represents a way of seeing that is passing. JR’s sunglasses represent a way of looking at the world through a filter. It is the palimpsest’s paradox: the film saves what is disappearing and, by framing it, also changes it. They see the world differently, and yet they are able to collaborate together. Rather than lament the loss and the difference, the combination of their artistic visions bring joy to the ordinary people they visit.

In Visages Villages, JR never removes his sunglasses that prevent Varda from ever seeing his eyes, reminding Varda of Jean-Luc Godard who wore his sunglasses in her film Cleo from 5 to 7. In a moment of nostalgia, Varda takes JR to meet Godard at his home. She has not seen Godard in many years and warns JR that he is unpredictable. When they reach his house, he refuses to meet them. Instead, he writes a note for her on the outside glass of the entry to the house. The message reads “A la ville de Douarnenez, Du côté de la côte.” (Visages Villages 01:22:50–01:23:05). Varda reveals that the phrase “à la ville de Douarnenez” refers to a place where her deceased husband, Jacques Demy, Godard and she spent time together. “Du côté de la côte” is a film Varda made. These two phrases demonstrate that Godard knows that she is there but refuses to see her. She calls him a dirty rat for playing such a cruel joke on her. Before leaving, she writes a message to Godard thanking him for all the good memories, but not for his bad hospitality. The two collaborators move to a bench by the lake to discuss what happened. JR interprets Godard’s act as a way to challenge the narrative structure of Varda’s film. Varda corrects him and says “notre film” (Visages Villages 01:24:49–01:25:00).13 JR adds that because Varda was still writing and making films, Godard wanted to write too, and their two narratives came together on the wall of Godard’s house. In that gesture, Visages Villages literally writes over Varda’s earlier wall-film, Mur Murs. The new work inscribes fresh words on a wall while the older film’s language of talking walls still shows through. This becomes an inter-filmic palimpsest of memory, friendship, and rivalry.

5. Coda: The Archivable Wall

Read with Mur Murs, the closing exchange between Varda and JR reveals what the films have been practicing all along: a self-authorization through palimpsest, where film overwrites and keeps what matters legible. In this exchange, JR reassures Varda about Godard’s intentions towards Varda. However, it is interesting to note that Godard could have sent her a text message, called her or sent a message to the café where they were waiting. Instead, he chose to write a message on the wall of his house. Normally, when we say the “handwriting is on the wall,” this foretells a bad outcome. Certainly, Varda was hurt by his actions. Yet, in the end, Varda responds with her own message, taking back her own narrative. She inscribes her directorial voice on the wall of Godard, the wall of the French New Wave, the wall of male authority. In de Certeau’s terms, Varda’s gesture turns an urban space into a page she can write on. This leads the discussion, and therefore the creative process of two directors, towards a poetic conclusion to the film. JR is inspired to do something nice for Varda to cheer her up. So, he removes his glasses. (Visages Villages 01:25:33). The camera, however, is blurred to mirror what Varda sees. We do not see JR’s eyes and he remains the elusive artist to us, but by Varda he is seen. Varda closes the film with this: “Moi, je ne te vois pas très bien, mais je te vois. On regarde le lac?” (Visages Villages 01:25:41).14 These phrases recall the earlier ones from the hospital scene, emphasizing each artist’s vision that leads them to happiness. In these concluding statements, Agnès Varda acknowledges that we all have faulty vision, or that we lack some insight, much like Godard failed to see Varda. However, that is not important. What matters is seeing each other. Varda invites JR, and the audience by extension, to join her gaze towards the lake, a metaphor for the empty palate. It is an invitation to see like her and to create meaning with her. In this sense, Varda’s cinema acts as what Paula Amad calls a counter-archive because it collects the fleeting and the fragile, turning everyday moments into the history of the present. Like Derrida’s archive, Varda’s walls and films bet on the future, ensuring that what might vanish is visible for re-reading and reviewing. Read alongside Mur Murs, this final exchange seals a diptych: two journeys across walls in which cinema remembers by rewriting. Each film is legible with the other shimmering beneath it, like fresh paint that still lets the earlier strokes show through. Through a palimpsestuous process of layering vision, meaning and representation onto walls, Agnès Varda will forever be remembered as a director and visionary who broke through walls of filmmaking.