Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Genre: Documentary

Running Time: 87 minutes

Box Office: $3, 290, 582

Directed by: Bansky

The most rewarding and enlightening of my movie-going experiences happen
when I find myself questioning the entire process of the filmmaker. The best is when
everything I just witnessed – perception, intention, and motivation – intertwine into an
amorphous mass of doubt and confusion. Exit Through The Gift Shop is a massive hall of
mirrors set up to make you wonder who you’re looking at and when, and if everything is
really what it is proposed to be. This excellent film is finally coming to DVD and being given a chance for mass circulation and success. It would certainly be a funny thing to see this film garner

outstanding success on DVD, as it is a film that derides art as commerce. This adds to
the question of whether or not this film takes itself seriously – or even knows that it is
sending a message – making for fun, seriously engaging post-viewing discussions.
The movie heaps pile of firewood onto the heated age-old question of the
documentary genre: Does what you see in a documentary come with an ounce of
truth? Many people make the mistake of equating the word “documentary” with the
word “real.” That would be a false analogy that misinforms the audience, misconstrues
the art, and quite frankly takes the fun out of it. I would much prefer to ponder the merits
of the constructed reality laid before me, than take it for what it is on a literal basis each
time.

This is where Exit Through The Gift Shop really shines. It springs into the realm
of meta as an almost documentary of a documentary, and begs you to doubt everything
you see. To go too in-depth about the film and its parts would ruin it, so I won’t do that. I
will simply call it a would-be satire that brings to light what I already suspected: that the
art world at large is a joke.

The story behind the film is vastly entertaining, and brilliant if it was indeed all a
hoax. Thierry Guetta and world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy are the interchangeable
foils of the film, and absolutely perfect as a dichotomy. Bansky’s identity is never
revealed, and he sure as hell could be Theirry himself. Or Barack Obama. Or even me.
With this conundrum comes a change in point of view halfway through the film that
really begins to define its purpose. The switch from Thierry to Bansky as protagonist
makes for one of the more interesting switcheroo moments in cinema in the past few
years. Who is who, exactly?