Introduction:
Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it was an audience favorite.  It opened in theatres to universal acclaim (97% on Rotten Tomatoes) and went on to become one of the highest grossing documentaries of the year. 

Exit Through the Gift Shop is the inside story of street art - a chaotic brew of illegal self-expression that exploded into a global phenomenon at the turn of this century - and what happened when an eccentric shopkeeper-turned-amateur filmmaker named Thierry Guetta set out to produce the ultimate documentary on the art form. After spending five years videotaping many of the world’s most infamous vandals at work, he met Banksy, a camera shy British stencil artist who felt Guetta himself would make a more fitting subject for a documentary.

Turning the camera back on its owner with wildly unexpected results, Exit Through the Gift Shop reveals what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide. One of the most provocative films about art ever made, Banksy tells the incredible true story of what happened when Guetta  transformed himself into street art sensation Mr. Brainwash. By turns surprising, hilarious and absurd, this is an enthralling modern-day fairytale... with bolt cutters.

The Movie: 8
While the documentary clearly states up front “A Banksy film” it is not so clear who the director or writer is, if indeed there is a director or writer as such. My suspicion is that that it is pretty much the work of the producer, Jamie D’Cruz and the editors, Chris King and Tom Fulford, based on what they were able to glean from some 10,0000 hours of Guetta’s tapes and from the interviews they themselves conducted and that are edited into the movie.

Oscilloscope’s DVD of Exit Through the Gift Shop works on a number of levels: The box itself is a minor work of art and includes some fun inserts. The feature documentary is something of a biopic about a compulsive videotape photographer. A dispassionate Rhys Ivans (Notting Hill, Pirate Radio) narrates the story of Thierry Guetta, a French ex-patriot living in Los Angeles with his wife and young children in the 1990s. Thierry, who prefers the anglicized “Terry” (our first clue) and whom Roger Ebert describes as “a combination TV pitchman, a cartoon Frenchman and a chatty con man” films everything, as if walking about life with a camera stuck on his face. What is fascinating about this behavior besides the obvious is that Guetta doesn’t watch anything he shoots, he simply stores endless numbers of tapes, many labeled with scarcely enough information to describe the gist of its contents, if that.

Like the encyclopedia-writing infinite number of monkeys, Guetta stumbles into L.A.’s developing graffiti artistic vandals. He follows them about, some more than others, like “Space Invader” and the soon to famous Shepard Fairey. The more he learns about the phenomenon, the more he obsesses about the one artist missing from his catalogue, the brilliant and secretive “Banksy”. When Banksy visits L.A., Guetta finds his way to him quite by chance and soon makes himself indispensable, showing him the “best walls” in town to display his work.

Banksy suggests to Thierry the idea that he make a documentary from his many tapes about the growth of street art. Cut to six months later, Thierry shows Banksy what he’s got, which he titles “Life Remote Control”. Banksy feels there is no movie there at all and suggests to Thierry he leave his tapes with him, along with his movie, and tells him to return home and make some art of his own. Voila! “Mr Brainwash” or “MBW,” Thierry’s new moniker.

How Guetta’s trajectory as an artist and Banksy’s rising fame came together, rather subversively, explosively one might say, dramatizes an important and rarely met question: What is good art? After all, those who can, and many who cannot but do anyway, spend small fortunes to own a piece of what comes to be universally acknowledged as good art -or, at least, art that is deemed valuable and therefore worth owning. When is good taste merely fashion? And when is fashion the result of mass hysteria? Can the art world be tricked into seeing something as important when it is merely undercooked, regardless of endorsements? If these questions intrigue, or even if they don’t you should see Banksy’s first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. You’ll never look at art the same way again.

Leonard Norwitz
LensViews
December 8th,, 2010

1) Oscilloscope Laboratories - Region 1 - NTSC TOP

2) Revolver Entertainment - Region FREE - Blu-ray MIDDLE

3) Oscilloscope Laboratories - Region FREE - Blu-ray BOTTOM