This is my entry for “E” in the Blogging A to Z Challenge. Throughout April I will be watching and reviewing a documentary movie from A to Z. This is the first”E” documentary I’ve reviewed.
Title: Exit Through the Gift Shop
Release Date: January 24, 2010
Director: Banksy
Production Company: Paranoid Pictures
Summary/Review:
This is called “A Banksy Film,” but right at the beginning Banksy (or someone claiming to be Banksy since his face and voice are obstructed) says it’s actually about someone he finds more interesting. That person is a French immigrant to Los Angeles who runs a consignment shop, Thierry Guetta. Guetta has a hobby of videotaping just about anything going on his life and through a cousin known as Invader he’s introduced to the underground world of street art. He soon begins following and filming some of the most famed street artists at work including Shepard Fairey, and ultimately Banksy.
While purportedly working on a documentary about street artists, Guetta has no experience editing and producing a movie and ends up with hundreds of hours of unwatched film. About 2/3’s of the way through Exit Through the Gift Shop, the perspective shifts and ends up following Guetta as he takes up street art himself under the name Mr. Brainwash and setting up a ludicrously oversized gallery exhibition in Los Angeles. The tension in the later parts of the film weighs heavily on Guetta clearly having no skill as an artist or experience putting on an exhibition, but ultimately drawing a huge audience and making huge profits in art sales (much to the disgust of the experienced street artists).
There are questions about whether this movie is a hoax and even if Guetta is a real person or an actor, perhaps even the real Banksy. My impression is that parts of it are true, such as Guetta really being a hanger-on obsessed with filming street artists, whereas the exhibition was likely put together by Banksy and others using Guetta as the front in an attempt to parody the consumerist culture of the art world. At least I hope Guetta was in on the joke.
What Can One Learn From Watching This Documentary:
Hoax or not, Exit Through the Gift Shop was an introduction to me of many prominent street artists and the methods of their work. As a film it also works as a prompt to question media and learning to distinguish between what is real and what the creators are trying to make you believe.
If You Like This You Might Also Want To …: Watch The Case of the Grinning Cat which documents the cultural phenomenon of a work of street art in Paris in the early 2000s. unSpun is a guidebook to sorting fact from fiction.
Source: I watched this movie on Netflix streaming.
Rating: ***
Panorama of the Mountains 