The Reality of Exit Through the Gift Shop

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My first-class awarded university video essay.
‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is Banksy’s 2010 entry into documentary filmmaking, and yet another instance of him painting over someone else’s business because the work just had to be seen. The feature is made from many hours of golden footage of the meteoric rise (and arguably the subsequent fall) of the street art movement. A movement wherein artists made colour from a “legal grey” as Banksy himself considers their area of operation. Banksy has us watch as these artists are confronted by police, then watch how confused they are when they are eventually confronted by auctioneers. And as street artists begin to play the role of police in their own art form as soon as those auctioneers are involved.
Banksy has always mixed social criticism with bone dry humour. As he describes in his first book, “graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.” Exit Through the Gift Shop is his moving picture, enormously entertaining, with a clear attempt to this time critique the commodification of street art and the effect it has had on what art gets appreciated, and how.
This video essay seeks to establish important, somewhat complex context and explore why Banksy may have taken his own art in this direction, and how he chose to critique commodification. But this process is interrupted with the acknowledgement of popular speculation that the film was an elaborate hoax. Rarely does a film elicit this specific reaction, so Exit Through the Gift Shop is worth studying - what ought to be believed? And more easily answerable, how does this ambiguity operate in relation to the critique presented by the film?
This essay attempts to swiftly illustrate in clear audio-visual terms the lessons that can be taken from the documentary; that the ambiguous situation of the documentary, pointed in its critique, draws out a reconfiguration of art criticism - the means by which one assesses truth is not so different from that which assesses value. The unknowing regarding the film’s authenticity has a metatextual purpose. The viewer is placed in a very active position if the joke could well be on them. Only, film has been a game of deception between filmmaker and audience for a long time indeed. Despite its relative uniqueness. Banksy’s film is illuminated (becoming perhaps an essay film) in its (Schrödinger’s) placing in a historic catalogue of docufiction. These types of films “help to expand our understanding of what constitutes a documentary by forming a troubled relationship with the real.” For me, they paradoxically draw attention to that which they could be defined as obfuscating - the boundaries of reality.
Additionally, the film is illuminated in its ambiguous situation in that it can inspire more than one distinct and detailed reading simultaneously. And to want to narrow the film to only produce one grounded reading of the facts would be like wanting to make the mystery box nothing more than the box - charmless and shallower.
A consequence of this illustration is being confronted with the awareness (reiterated by Orson Welles) that the map is not the territory and images are treacherous things. That film is not reality and that really all films, all artworks, deceive on some level as constructions. A documentary filmmaker does not record, they interpret. Perhaps a simple truth, but always a freeing, thought-provoking and creatively inspirational reminder.

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@hblee88 Жыл бұрын

Exit Through the Gift Shop: Thank you for somewhat "simplifying" the complex & surreal reasons of why this eclectic film is so compelling & appreciated by those like myself.