Documentary December – Exit Through the Gift Shop

There’s a lot of speculation regarding how true the events portrayed in the Banksy documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, actually are. After considering it a while, I’ve decided that I have no goddamn idea. But let’s start at the beginning.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 86 minutes

Directed by: Banksy, Shepard Fairy

Starring: Thierry Guetta, Banksy, Shepard Fairy

Theatrical Release: 04/16/10

DVD Release: 12/14/10

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $3.29 million

Metacritic Score: 85/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 97%

Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the story of Thierry Guetta and the eight years he spent relentlessly shooting footage for his great street art documentary, Life Remote Control. Thierry begins filming his cousin, whom goes by the moniker Space Invader, as his graffiti deals exclusively with the imagery of the ancient video game of the same name. Almost instantly upon shooting Space Invader in action, Thierry is obsessed. He quickly branches out from there, slowly but surely meeting and filming the biggest artists in street art including arguably the biggest name, Banksy, whom is shown only in shadow. Thierry travels the world, filming the hijinks. He scales buildings side by side with the graffiti artists he films and tightropes the peaks of steep rooftops to get the perfect shot. The artists respect his enthusiasm and fearlessness and not only let Thierry shoot them freely but befriend him in the process.

It’s not until much later – approximately 6 or 7 years, in fact – that they realize he is in no way a legitimate filmmaker. He is just a guy that compulsively films everything around him, never bothering to watch the boxes and boxes of tapes lining the walls of his residence. (As Banksy describes it, “I realized Thierry was not a filmmaker but a guy with mental problems.”)

This is where the reality of the events begin to come into question. At Banksy’s insistence, Thierry does attempt to edit together a movie out of his countless hours of footage. We are shown a couple of clips of the final product, which are essentially micro-fragments of nonsense strung together. No shot is over 1 or 2 seconds, nor do they relate to clips before or after them. Totally incoherent.

It’s at this point that Banksy takes over the project and Thierry takes on the street art name Mr. Brainwash and sets out to make a name for himself. The idea that the latter is a hoax has been put forth many times, and I really can’t say. I don’t want to ruin the ending of the movie by giving a lot of details, but I’ll say that the whole thing is almost too clever to be completely true and all of the facts represented accurate.

In any case, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an entertaining movie. It isn’t really the definitive street art documentary that Thierry may or may not have ever intended it to be, though if there’s a hoax involved it does make a fitting piece in Banksy’s collection. Thierry is an interesting character, however much fact or fiction he truly is.