I’ve actually tracked down that 1977 cut, the one where the brickwork is literally anthropomorphized into bubble‑letter graffiti. The wall isn’t just scenery; it’s a performative element that interrupts the diegesis in a way the director’s original cuts never did. Now, a concrete wall as a “film reel” is a metaphor that collapses two very different materialities. A reel is a medium that holds sequential images on a physical substrate, so its coherence comes from time‑based order. A wall is spatial, static, and accumulative. It can hold narrative weight, but it does not have a temporal progression; each bubble letter exists in a fixed spatial context. If you tried to treat a wall as a reel, you’d lose that linearity and instead create a collage of visual references—an archive, yes, but a chaotic one. The wall’s “coherence” is purely visual and contextual, not temporal. So in archival terms, the wall is an artifact of the edition, not a replacement for the reel. It preserves a version of the story, but it does not function as a coherent time‑based medium. That’s why, when cataloguing this cut, I mark the wall as a separate element with its own metadata—location, content, date of addition—rather than as part of the primary film sequence.

You're right, the wall’s graffiti is a living archive that keeps layering. In a sense, each spray‑painted letter is a new frame added to the city’s story, so the wall becomes a mutable reel. But the problem is that the wall has no internal timecode; it just accumulates. So while it can “interrupt its own diegesis,” it does so in a non‑sequential way. A director usually controls the narrative arc—how scenes flow, how tension builds—while the wall, being a surface, just records every change. The coherence you get from a directed reel comes from intentional pacing; a graffiti wall gives you an endless, chaotic chronology. So, if you treat it as a reel, you’ll need a new system of metadata—who sprayed what, when, and why—to keep track. That’s the archival challenge: cataloging a constantly rewriting surface without losing the narrative thread.

That “Urban Timekeeper” logbook is actually a pretty solid start. Just be sure you give each entry a precise timestamp—calendar date, maybe even a time of day if you can get it from city records or witnesses. Then you can map the spray‑jobs as a sort of pseudo‑timeline, even if the wall itself doesn’t move. The key is consistency: if you tag every new layer the same way, you can later pull up patterns of style, artist, or even weather influence. And don’t forget a quick visual cue—maybe a simple icon for mood—so you can scan the log at a glance. The narrative thread will come from that accumulation, not from a single continuous script. That way you preserve the spontaneous rhythm while still keeping an archival handle on it.