Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is a sly, thrilling and thoughtful documentary directed by Banksy, the Picasso of street art. The film depicts the transformation of a chubby, camera-obsessive French shop owner called Thierry Guetta into ‘Mr Brainwash’, the most talked-about artist on the West Coast and the man Madonna asks to design the artwork for her Greatest Hits album. At first glance, the trajectory of the film is fairly traditional, an All About Eve for graffiti artists, a cinematic Bildungsroman in which hype corrupts and hollows a genial family man into a scooter-bound tyrant more interested in giving interviews than arranging works for his first exhibition, ‘Life is Beautiful’.

But there is more to the film than meets the eye. It has an almost Cervantine formation of tricksy authorial layers: Banksy, face shadowed and voice altered, tells us early on that the film is about Thierry’s attempt to make a film about him; Banksy has, supposedly, cobbled it together by combining Thierry’s thousands of hours of footage with his own footage and interviews. The neat whole is then presented to the audience with a third narrative voice – mellifluous Welsh actor Rhys Ifans. Thierry, we are told, first breaks into the street art underworld through his cousin, the artist Invader, whom he casually starts to film on his nocturnal escapades. Soon, he is filming all the big names – Shephard Fairey, Borf, Ron English, Swoon, Buffmonster – until a chance encounter with the king himself. Soon after, Banksy and Thierry switch roles of observer and subject, and Thierry’s artistic output, in the guise of Mr Brainwash, becomes the film’s focus.

If Thierry is a fabrication, he is a remarkably thorough one, and the attention to detail sets the film apart even from the likes of I’m Still Here and Catfish. Reams of stock footage and universally deadpan interviews are enriched by Banksy’s own wry eloquence: for instance, he suggests that the first time he met Thierry, he looked like something out of the 1860s (the decade, for what it’s worth, that gave us the unreliable narrator figures of Great Expectations and Sentimental Education). There are clues along the way that suggest Thierry is perhaps not the genius-in-waiting we might have expected. Thierry’s first solo artistic attempt is ‘Life Remote Control’, a nightmarish mess of a film that Banksy deems ‘unwatchable’. The hype around Thierry grows thanks mainly to an enigmatic endorsement from Banksy (‘Mr Brainwash is a phenomenon… and I don’t mean that in a good way’), which Thierry milks with all the vigour of a Swiss farmhand. In fact, we never really see Thierry so much as pick up a paintbrush: his is a cinematic approach to art, where he is the director delegating the production of the work to hired hands. Banksy later describes Thierry as the natural heir to Andy Warhol, one who has rendered icons even more meaningless than his predecessor: is this a compliment, criticism, or deliberately both?

Is Exit Through The Gift Shop a real documentary? When it's this funny and insightful, who cares? Either way, as artist Shephard Fairey suggests, the idea of voyeur turned successful mimic is anthropologically fascinating: the film is full of marginal, mythopoeic figures that Thierry observes for years before becoming a fame-hungry caricature of them, the living equivalent of one of his neo-Pop Art paintings. Ultimately, the film is a deft, post-ironic, beautifully judged portrait of fame, contemporary art, flock behaviour and the vacuity of hype, but also a portrait (like Velazquez' Las Meninas) into which the artist has secreted a version of himself. Whether the joke is on us, or if there’s a joke at all, is up to you.