Banksy (2010)

I liked the song – ‘Tonight the Streets Are Ours’ by Richard Hawley – which is played over the opening and closing credits. Otherwise, this was the most annoying film I’d seen in some time.  I’ve barely given it a second thought in the nearly four weeks since I saw it so I shouldn’t pretend it made much impression at all but I do remember that one of its chief irritations was that it left me virtually powerless to criticise.  I know next to nothing about the subject; the film’s layers of put-on and irony are designed to make it unassailable.  Exit Through the Gift Shop appears to be about changing places.  Thierry Guetta, a French videographer[1], is making a film about graffiti art with Banksy at its centre – this is naturally a pretty frustrating enterprise, given Banksy’s determined anonymity.  The two men meet by accident in Los Angeles (where Guetta now lives) and get to know each other.  Guetta, having shot loads of film, turns it, on Banksy’s instructions, into something that we’re told looks like ninety minutes of channel-hopping with a remote control (we see a mercifully brief excerpt).  As this seems meant to prove that Guetta has no talent for structured film-making, Banksy makes a film about him instead – while Guetta, under the name of Mister Brainwash, becomes a commercially successful street/pop artist, whose work draws particularly on the art of Andy Warhol and of Banksy himself.

The film describes the build-up to the opening of Mister Brainwash’s debut show, ‘Life is Beautiful’, in Los Angeles in 2008.   The structure of this is conventional – protracted and made mechanically suspenseful through the ups and downs of getting the show on.  (It’s like the twists in reality-television-inflected game shows, when the contestants are preparing for the latest stage of the competition.)   And the narrative is clichéd – ‘A new star of the art world is born … Thierry’s show is a sensation’, and so on.  You’re aware, however, that to criticise Exit in these terms is to risk being told you didn’t get it, that Banksy is spoofing success story narrative/reporting.   With his face concealed and his voice distorted on the soundtrack, Banksy appears to provide an intermittent commentary on the Mister Brainwash story and rehearsed, ironic putdowns of Thierry Guetta.   Is Banksy really annoyed by Guetta’s success, or is he resignedly amused by the fact that it demonstrates the craziness of a celebrity-hungry art world and the gullibility and fickleness of art consumers?   (Are you even supposed to ask that question?)

It’s hard to be sure whether the protagonists are real or imagined, and inducing this kind of uncertainty is likely to win Banksy praise for raising fundamental questions about artifice, the nature of the viewer’s relationship to what s/he is seeing on screen, that kind of thing (although you could also regard his film simply as a wank).  It rings true when Banksy talks about his nervousness at allowing Thierry Guetta get reasonably close to him and I assumed that Guetta’s account of his childhood was genuine – but it doesn’t seem to matter eventually whether these things are true or not.  (Guetta tells us that he hadn’t been aware that this mother was terminally ill and that her death sowed the seeds of his obsession with recording everything.  I don’t think he explains why he stockpiles his collection of video footage without converting it into film, until he starts making the Banksy piece.)  For all I know, the person who appears as Banksy might not be the real one and the person who claims to be Thierry Guetta is as much an invention as Mister Brainwash.   Guetta talks such circumlocutory crap from the beginning – it takes him many sentences to convey a single, simple idea – that you think he must either be meant to be delightful because of the contrast between his verbal inarticulacy and his visual sense, or a fake.  One thing I’m confident is not a fiction is the employment of Rhys Ifans to supply the narration, a choice which immediately erased my confidence in Banksy’s taste.  Evans sounds like a heavily tranquillised and unfunny version of Alexei Sayle:  his deliberately roguish reading certainly contributes to the film’s annoyingness.  Much of the art – Banksy’s especially – is marvellous but Exit Through the Giftshop is an illustration of the fallacy that because an artist produces interesting work it must be worth getting their comments on the production of art, their own or anyone else’s.

17 March 2010

[1] According to Wikipedia, a videographer is ‘a person who works in the video medium — recording moving images and sound on tape, disk, other electro-mechanical device, or broadcasting live’.