Random Thoughts

So this is a decade later than Varda’s three previous California movies?

Oh, this is a documentary about murals in Los Angeles?

This is fantastic. It’s got a free-flowing delightful kind of flow. And these murals are pretty amazing.

I’m guessing that funding for this sort of thing dried up when Reagan came into office?

Varda’s really good at… well… everything… and the subject matter is interesting. But the people she’s interviewing aren’t saying anything fascinating. So I’m getting a bit bored. It was much better at the start when it was more abstract.

As the movie progresses, it becomes a bit pedestrian? It might just come down to Varda’s music choices. The soundtrack is a total mish-mash of … everything, but nothing is distinctive or interesting.

I really love Varda’s choice of having that guy on the voice-over recite the names of the mural artists whenever we shift to a new shot. At first I didn’t quite understand — I thought he was perhaps saying what streets the murals were on? But no. It’s clever. Putting the names on the screen would be distracting, but having the guy almost-whisper their names has an impact.

Heh! It’s hare krishnas selling Alice Coltrane albums! I’ve got that one!

That is very cheap!

Amazing. There was a slaughterhouse in LA that employed two painters for 12 years (!) to paint the entire huge plant (killing 6K pigs per day) with these bucolic images.

That’s what I want my bathroom to look like!

Mur Murs. Agnès Varda. 1980.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

I’m enjoying this movie… but… I can’t help wondering how this would have played out of it had had French actors instead of American actors. These people just don’t seem… intriguing? Especially the guys. And since so much of this seems improvised, that’s a problem.

OK, I’m getting into this now.

Yeah, whenever the two guys are on screen, it just gets less interesting. It’s like they’re trying to make things TotAlly KooKy, and instead it just gets… community theatre.

Oh, the two guys are the people who wrote the music for Hair.

There’s the germ of a brilliant movie in here. The meta stuff is a lot of fun. But then it goes into long improvised scenes that aren’t… thrilling… and Varda gets bored herself with the actors and does quick fast-forwards and stuff, and that’s fun, too, but it doesn’t really fix the major problem here: That the Hair guys are really boring.

Hehe. Shirley refuses to do the movie, so Agnés has to step in instead.

No, Shirley’s back!

I love this scene.

The ending here is just amazing. Brilliant. But that’s the thing with this movie: It has these shockingly vivid scenes that makes me go “THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER” and then there’s two more scenes with the Hair guys that… do not… work.

So this is a thrilling movie. In parts. Those parts really make it worthwhile to watch this, but overall it’s not that compelling. So:

Lions Love… and Lies. Agnés Varda. 1969.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

This is brilliant. Varda’s having a lot of fun with doing a documentary and then questioning whether it’s fiction or not.

It’s overwhelming. It’s very Godard.

This is brilliant.

Uncle Yanco. Agnès Varda. 1967.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

With every purchase.

This is very different from Varda’s earlier movies. I mean, not the subject matter, but the way it’s filmed and edited. It’s so restless and frantic.

The little red book is in such a practical format.

But this is really good. It’s got Varda’s eye for details, and her curiosity about everything.

Black Panthers. Agnès Varda. 1968.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.