Making the Invisibles Seen

The film Visages, Villages (Faces, Places) quite literally shows that buildings and structures are supposed to be about people, a realization of which some architects need to be reminded from time to time. The film's unique relationship of face, place and building is an intriguing instruction for those who deal with places and people.

In a classic road movie, but set in France, an odd couple drives a box van through France to discover the type of usually invisible people who are constitute the silent majority. One by one, these people which normally blend in, begin to stand out, there faces become large and their stories remarkable.

Visages,Villages, the miner's widow, larger than life

Like a good architect the young photographer and Jean Luc Godard wannabe J.R. (always with sunglasses) and his nearly 90 year old companion photographer and filmmaker Agnes Varda, slowly going blind, (which is maybe why she hates those sunglasses) scout locations, landscapes and settings for an appropriate expression for their art (both essentially are playing themselves and their actual lives).

More importantly, though, they scout for people and when they find them, their art consists of teasing out of them what makes them special, make that specialness visible and literally enlarge their faces in their own places. In a double coup, the two artists use photography to see buildings, places, faces and stories in an all new light, by making buildings the substrate for supersized faces scaling portraits to the size of buildings.
The film's allusions to the Swiss French film revolutionary Godard don't end with the protagonist wearing sunglasses, the entire film has many Godard elements from its fuzzy line between documentary and motion picture and from the unscripted dialogue to the "accidental" highlighting of the ordinary as the special. Like Goddard JR and Varda are teaching the viewer to see things anew and with a different eye.

The mailman and his role in town

Godard is also supposed to become the crowning highlight of the movie when his admirer Varda has arranged a visit at his house but Godard, apparently still a rule breaker, flouts courtesy and stands them up with a felt pen scribble note at the door of his otherwise shuttered house.  Thus Varda is deprived the end of her script and the moviegoer can endlessly speculate if fruitlessly waiting for Godard's was possibly part of a script or if protagonist Varda is as genuinely disappointed as it appears in the film.Consolation takes place outside town at a lake beautifully demonstrating the calming effect water in nature can have.

“They won’t throw me out. I have too many memories here ... no one can understand what we lived through.”Jeanine, the last inhabitant of a row of coal-miner houses 

Ever since Jane Jacobs launched her battle with Robert Moses architects and urban planners pay special attention to the "eyes on the street", have gained a deeper understanding that cities are nothing without their people. But the shift from bricks and mortar to people doesn't didn't end succeed as thoroughly as many would like to think. The Robert Moses fixation on building big things, often against the people is far from eradicated.

Broken City installation

A lack of focus on people contributed to the 1968 eruption of civil unrest in many American and French cities and many other times since, most recently in St Louis and Baltimore. The tendency of cities to develop on two tracks, the one glitzy and shiny the other disinvested and desolate furthers societal inequity and makes entire sets of populations invisible.

In what could be described as an omission, Visages, Villages doesn't deal with the inequities of race and includes no people of color even though race plays a large role in France, but the film shows shows that disinvestment and desolation are not only a topic of American cities and towns. The movie brings the downtrodden and forgotten beautifully into view, whether they are truly poor and outcast, such as a nearly toothless hermit living in his encampment outside of town creatively decorated with bottlecap mosaics, or whether they are regular working class people such as a postman, a farmer, a goat cheese producer, a restaurant waitress or shift workers in a chemical plant. The film celebrates women which becomes especially beautiful in the scenes where the wives of dockworkers are the heroes, or the lone widow in a row of abandoned miners homes who resists to move.

All of the films initially modest and self conscious protagonists begin to see themselves with new eyes by being truly seen by others for the first time, once their faces and bodies appear on building walls, barn-doors, factory retaining walls or shipping containers. In each case it is the building or structure in a place or village that gives this visibility its setting and makes it meaningful. For, without being seen the art would not have its effect. In the ghettos of American cities the mural has taken on a similar role. Baltimore is full of the building size portraits of local heroes, victims, notably Freddie Gray whose death in police custody sparked the unrest of 2015.

Reviving a ghost town

In a beautiful move, J.R. and Varda invite people to populate a small French ghost town which is  silently sinking deeper and deeper into decay. Nearby residents come, picnic and walk through the doors of the ruins, look out of hollow windows and one by one their super-sized portraits appear on the building walls until the ghost town is anything but dead. There is no way that a resident of Baltimore would not watch this beautiful scene and not imagine some kind of magic revival of those parts of town where boarded buildings outnumber the occupied ones. The film makers emphasize how ephemeral their paper art is. The big posters aren't a solution, but a kickstarter, a boost, a switch that allows to see the trivial of the everyday in a new shine. In that the giant portraits resemble the mini pop-up parks of Park-ing Day, the pop-up parks on abandoned vacant neighborhood lots or the walking and biking parties on urban streets made popular by cyclo-via. it is assumed that the boost can be sufficient to change things for good.

The pop-up, with ties to  guerrilla urbanism and the open streets movement, is usually a grassroots strategy to cast a new vision for places and for people who normally do not have a prominent voice in planning decisions or in urban investment. This imagined reinvention takes on many forms where advocates transform dumpsters, buses, cargo containers, vacant lots and auto-crazed roads into vibrant places. (Blue Review)

Broken City Lab billboard installation

Urban planning, taking a lesson from this film, would plan low budget installations and events which help the forgotten residents of the city to see themselves and their often sadly neglected neighborhoods in a new light. That could be taken literally, like the light installations in vacant buildings that allowed the old shells to glow for a few weeks, reminding observers of their past beauty, or more figuratively, such as with residents taking over the streets in marches against crime or with murals who project visions of a better future onto barren walls.
The film is currently on screen. It is uplifting and shows without any righteousness a very sympathetic view of people. We needs this once in a while.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Pop Up Cities: Selling the Temporary Future

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