Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Review
“It’s the worlds’ first street-art disaster movie”, reads the tagline for the indie street-art documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop. It’s not often that one hears the words street-art and disaster used in the same sentence, let alone in the same paragraph, but this film manages to combine these distant concepts, and it does it well. Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film, which is the official title of this “documentary on acid”, chronicles the work of various underground street-artists from around the world. The flow and plot of this film are so wonderfully random, complex, and yet oddly understandable, that it’s impossible to express in words.
The film begins without any subject whatsoever, consisting only of a man, his family, and a handheld camera. This man, named Thierry Gutta (a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash), who also happens to be both the director and eventual subject of the film (I’ll explain later), has an obsession with filming everything he does, and I do mean EVERYTHING. And by that I mean he never goes anywhere without a camera. This need to document everything that occurs to him in life stems out of the death of his mother when he was a small child; because his missed this important event, he feels that every second that he’s not documenting life, he’s losing precious memories forever. For years he continues on with this seemingly aimless obsession, with no subject at all, until he meets his cousin who introduces him to the underground world known as street-art. His brother, who goes by the nickname Space Invader, puts together characters from different retro video games, i.e. Space Invader, with mosaic tiles, and glues them on random surfaces all over the city of Paris, and eventually around the world. On a trip back to his hometown of Paris, Gutta is introduced to his brother’s work and is immediately drawn into it and begins filming his brothers nightly escapades all over the city of Paris. Gutta eventually expands this filming of his brother’s street art to many different street-artists from around the world, which inevitably becomes the subject of the documentary. After spending a few years documenting various artists, Gutta is eventually introduced the famous (or should I say infamous) Banksy, who is known the world over for his provocative and sometimes inflammatory graffiti pieces. Banksy thusly becomes the new subject of the film, as Gutta follows him everywhere he goes. And here’s where the film becomes confusing, very confusing. Because of the amount of time Gutta had spent filming and studying the techniques of these many artists, he eventually becomes one himself, dawning the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash (which I will now refer to him as), and takes to the streets of LA creating his own original (or not so original) pieces of street-art. This causes the documentarian of the film to become the subject of the film, with the director becoming Banksy himself. Beyond that, see the film for yourself, and you’ll get exactly what this all means.
The sheer randomness with which this film is told is what makes it worth seeing. The film juxtaposes from one moment to the next between seemingly unconnected events. For example, in the span of five minutes, the film manages to shoot from a heavily-emotional personal narrative to a thrilling nighttime chase scene with a street-artist fleeing from the cops. At the same time, the film is self-aware of its own wackiness, and it seeks to strike a balance between the being avant garde and simply telling its own story. This strange balance that forms is at the core of what makes this film so unique and, well, different.
Exit Through the Gift Shop even manages to play around with a deeper question of what truly defines art and what art is and isn’t. It begs the question, “When is art really art? And what makes an artist original, rather than a clone of any other modern artist?” Because of the fact that Mr. Brainwash spent such a long time documenting and studying the various styles and techniques of these artists, he is able to emulate it in his own way almost effortlessly. The question of whether or not his work deserves any artistic merit is left to the viewer to contemplate. At one point, Banksy, being somewhat frustrated says, “I used to encourage everyone to create their own art, know I’m not so sure.” This comment poses that great question in a rather inelegant yet pointed way, and makes one sit back in his chair long after the film and ends and ponder what makes art, art.
It’s because of my love for films that maintain a sense of humor, yet still ask serious and thoughtful questions, that I give this film a (drumroll please)…
9.0/10- A Great Movie!
