5 Punk Art Films About Punk Art

4. Exit Through The Gift Shop

Who is Banksy? There are myriad answers to that question, but any response would only result in a tidal wave of deeper, stranger queries. Banksy is a prankster, a painter, a sculptor, an innovator and, now, a filmmaker. For years, Banksy has been transforming billboard, walls, street corners and subway stations into incredible works of art. His paintings boggle the mind, playing with the human eye in a way that delights and astonishes. It€™s hard to argue with the idea that Banksy is a genius. If he even exists. See, because his artwork is created without permission or permits, everything he does is absolutely illegal. €˜Banksy€™ is his alias, which has led to dozens of theories about his identity, including one which suggests that €˜Banksy€™ is actually several different people, a conglomerate of artists working in tandem under a single guise. So things got weird once €˜Banksy€™ directed a movie. Exit Through The Gift Shop is a Mobius strip of a documentary film, a freak accident of chance that someone just happened to be filming. That €˜someone€™ was Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles who has a pathological obsession with filming every waking second of his own life. By chance, he stumbles into the street art movement, filming the artists while they dash about erecting their creations. For years, Guetta was allowed to film the artists by lying to them and saying he was working on a documentary, when actually he was dumping the tapes into a box in his house. A friendship blooms between Guetta and Banksy (portrayed with his face covered and voice altered), a friendship that takes yet another odd turn when Banksy asks if he can be allowed to make a movie out of the hours and hours of footage. Up to this point, Gift Shop would have been a fun and funny documentary about this odd lifestyle and the people who live it. But after handing over his footage, Guetta decides to pursue a career as an artist, stealing the style and look of his friends but re-purposing the art into a nakedly commercial venue. The art he creates is hackneyed and bad, but the public adores it and buys thousands upon thousands of dollars€™ worth of the stuff. How of that was real, how much was either staged or orchestrated by Banksy, has been under debate from the moment the film hit theaters. Real or fake, Exit Through The Gift Shop is an invaluable look at the processes of artists, the constant evolution of artforms, and the drive to do something original, copyright infringement be damned.