Exit Through the Gift Shop

Saw Exit Through the Gift Shop, a mercurial documentary about Mister Brainwash, a graffiti artist in LA. He's a French dude who started off obsessively filming his own life and somehow became attached to the French graffiti scene and from there to the LA graffiti scene and from there to graffiti artists all over the world. His holy grail of artists whom he wanted to attach himself to though, was Banksy, reclusive famous graffiti artist whose identity is still unknown (to me anyway, I don't really follow the graffiti art world.) However the film itself is opened by Mr Banksy explaining to us that this film is really about the would-be filmmaker, Mister Brainwash. This is confusing.

The film is about a film that fizzled out because the filmmaker was an obsessive, incapable of editing in any meaningful way. The subject of that film was supposed to be Banksy and the other street artists, but somehow God Emperor Banksy got control of the camera and is now running the show, positioning himself as the arbiter of taste and skewering Mr Brainwash as a lazy dilettante, in it only for the money, instead of in spite of the money ("This stuff is like gold," he says of spray paint. "You take a screen print of Lennon and PSS! And it's worth 20, 30 thousand dollars.") The film also captures the spirit of the failed film-within-the-film. That film was supposed to be about the rise and commercialization of graffiti art. In this film, we see the daring late-night heist-like painting, the brushes with the law, and finally Brad Pitt and Jude Law attending a graffiti art exhibit, and an auctioneer selling "a Banksy" for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So this film is about the celebrity Banksy, the lesser-known Mr Brainwash, and about street art in general. Like I say, this film is slippery, fundamentally only showing us a bunch of stuff that happened and letting us draw many arbitrary conclusions from it.

This is one of those documentaries that seem to be challenging you to understand it. It's a complex film, made that way by messiness and juxtaposition, like an eye-catching piece of graffiti. It has to be broad and understandable in many ways, offering an obvious point but also subtly implying layers underneath. An very nice film its one weakness is that, like all puzzle-style films, it is a bit thin. We don't learn any great truths about the human spirit, but we're dazzled for a while by the hall of mirrors and elusiveness of the subject(s). Good stuff.