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

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.