Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy directs a documentary about Thierry Guetta who immigrated from France in 1999. He opened a trendy vintage clothing shop in L.A. He is constantly filming with his video camera. He discovers his cousin is street artist Space Invader which turns into a more in-depth obsession with other street artists. Invader connects him with Shepard Fairey which leads to other artists. He gets intrigued with the secretive Banksy. He films Banksy and then Banksy turns the camera on him.

There is a fun energy about this. It feels guerrilla secretive outsider work. Then the question becomes whether this is real or fake or semi-real. It colors the movie for me. In the end, this is another form of street art. It doesn't have to follow any demands of a documentary. I took the whole movie with a grain of salt. It doesn't mean it's bad. I just wish this is a more definitive solid movie about Banksy.

An experience will ultimately become a diluted memory, unless the experience itself is documented in image or film, in which case it will last forever (or until it is deleted/destroyed...). 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' is a brilliant examination of the underground street art culture, and a poignant look at man's obsession with a culture he is increasingly drawn into throughout his life.

Thierry Guetta (pronounced Te-ree), is a French immigrant living Los Angeles with his loving wife and children and a good honest job, but there is one object he will never leave the house without; his video camera. Guetta has been enticed into the everyday cinema verité movement of simply recording any, and everything that goes on in his life. From playing with his children, to his ultimate attraction of following other street artists around and documenting their work, Guetta loves to watch, document and admire from behind the lens. Guetta eventually earns the trust and respect of various artists around the globe including the elusive Banksy, his cousin Space Invader and Shepard Fairey, and provides the audience with an up close and personal view of a culture (or industry) which has been projected into the limelight over the past five years.

Narrated by Rhys Ifans, 'Exit' has been acknowledged as not having a registered director, instead it is a smoothly edited combination of Guetta's extensive and various filmed sequences from over the years (the film shows his EXTENSIVE physical collection of tapes from more than decade of film-making) and interviews with various leading figures in the industry. For example Banksy is interviewed at length over his involvement with Guetta and comes across as a very down-to-earth, humble and at times, incredibly funny person. While everybody, including Guetta, are extremely brazen and don't hold back when speaking about each other, their profession or how the street art culture has developed over time into a somewhat monopolistic environment (which can be viewed by the fact that the rich and famous turned out in droves for Banksy's first exhibition in the United States).

This isn't a film about 'graffiti' though, as some may simply see it as on the surface, aside from the exploration of a fast growing community it is also a deep, scary and heart-warming look at Thierry Guetta's life over a decade onwards as he constantly leaves behind his family and his job to follow various artists around the globe. Mentally unstable, or one of the greatest French minds of the last twenty years, nobody is quite sure what Thierry Guetta (also known as Mr Brainwash) is, but what everybody does acknowledge is that he is a man with a passion and while he may not follow the same ideology as everybody else, his heart is still in the right place. 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' is a fascinating documentary focusing on a rising culture that many people may not have much knowledge about, except for knowing the name of the elusive, and as I have mentioned, surprisingly hilarious Banksy.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, the first film directed by reclusive street-art legend Banksy, is a little puzzle-box of a documentary. It's perfectly designed and pitched to be enjoyable on multiple levels: on one as an entertaining, illuminating mini-history of "street art" and on another - one entirely more convoluted and entertaining - as a light-hearted "up yours" to both street artists and their patrons.

Ostensibly (to take the film's word for it) Banksy's film came about when he, as the premiere 21st Century graffiti art darling, was approached by Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeleno. Guetta wanted to make a documentary about street art, and Banksy was the last major figure whose participation he felt he needed, as an affable personality, a love of video cameras and a chance relationship to Invader, a French street-art pioneer who networked with other artists like Shepard Fairey, had left Guetta with hundreds of hours of footage documenting the birth of the art.

After tracking Banksy down and shooting him working, Guetta retired to the cutting room. He emerged months later and showed it to Banksy. He didn't like the film, a couple of minutes of which are excerpted and are plainly terrible, and offered to take over Guetta's doc while Guetta returned to Los Angeles to turn himself into a street art sensation, named "Mr. Brainwash" or MBW. Transforming overnight from an affable, helpful documentarian to a one-man hype-monster artiste, MBW's enormous spraypaint cans, TV monsters and Warhol-style send-ups captured the attention of the LA art crowd, who spent over a million bucks on his stuff, much to the chagrin of Fairey and Banksy. Guetta's film about Banksy changes into Banksy's film about Guetta and street art, and the rise of a new unfortunate talent.

Except, as I and a lot of other folks believe, it's all made up. It's a hoax, it has to be, it's too hilariously perfect to be anything but. Banksy, as a street artist, has seen the perception of his works - by design temporary, and by design defacements - change from graffiti into art that needs preservation, that is cut out from walls and sold. Banksy, in making Exit Through the Gift Shop with Fairey and Guetta has found a way to deface, scrawl over and heap lighthearted disdain all over both himself and the people who snap up his art.

It's spectacular, it's brilliant and all the more so in that it's still a documentary, still a record of events. It's not artificial, not a mockumentary in the way that Spinal Tap is. MBW exists, having been created by Guetta or Banksy or both, and the film documents his arrival. Exactly who it is that arrives is the film's mystery.

Exit Through the Gift Shop captures the birth of a prank, an elaborate, entertaining gotcha that fits perfectly in Banksy's nose-tweaking, politically-aware, cheeky body of work. Moreover, the film doesn't rely on any rug-snapping-out to really work. It works if it's true, it works if it's not, because it's a construction that's above all entertaining. It's a glimpse, anyway, of a world that's built at night, by streetlight, one that's fascinating even if it is in the middle of pulling the wool over our eyes. It's genius, plain and (not so very much at all) simple.

Like the very nature of the underground street art movement "Exit Through the Gift Shop" feels fresh and almost subversive. It doesn't matter to me if it is a conceptualized mockumentary, or a genuine attempt to record the outsider reality experienced by brilliant street artists like Shepard Fairey, Invader, and the infamous Banksy. "Exit Through The Gift Shop" is mischievous and immediate in the same way that street art is.

Mainly we watch the evolution of Thierry Guetta from an obsessive-compulsive videographer to a successful popular artist whose street credibility is quickly parlayed into the show of shows. Guetta takes contemporary icons and gives them Warholian emphasis, so we see a reinvention of Madonna, who once reinvented herself in a Marilyn-like way, and who we later learn commissions Mister Brainwash (Guetta) to design her cover art. Guetta's point-of-view is absolutely authentic in the way it synthesizes and skewers popular culture. Or is it Banksy's point-of-view? It doesn't matter. It's brilliant, provocative, charming, and completely entertaining.

How is it until now I'd never seen this gem of a movie? The film is directed by notorious, and equally mysterious English street artist, Banksy. It uses many, many pieces of stock footage from a French shop keeper named Thierry Guetta (A man who would later be known as Mr. Brainwash), who follows many street artists all over the world, capturing their art on film before it is taken down. He soon comes across the man himself, capturing his art, and even attempts to make a documentary centered around the art, and the artists (Even though he has never made a film before). But Banksy decides to turn the tables, and instead focuses his own documentary on the life of Guetta. Why? As Banksy himself puts it, "He's a more interesting person than I am." An inspired decision on his part. Theirry Guetta really is a fascinating person, a man obsessed with taking a video camera everywhere he goes, and capturing these artists at work, having strong senses of passion for both. He is also a witty person, sometimes the things he says feel a little too odd to be true, but believe it. The film's portrait of the man is rather eccentric, and energetic.

A lot of this is to the credit of film editors Tom Fulford, and Chris King, whose editing and pacing is pitch perfect, always leaving proper delivery for some rather humorous things to occur, and never straying away from giving the world of art its own adequate time in the spotlight. The film really is a thought provoker, sometimes the life of the man can make you question "Is this for real?" I guess the whole film is really summed up by one phrase: "Time will tell whether I'm a rabbit, or a turtle." Sounds silly now, but once you hear it, the gears in your head start right up. It's a passionately crafted movie of a man with nothing but passion for what he does.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a diamond in the rough, one that I give **** out of ****