Exit through the gift shop ending a relationship

Exit Through the Gift Shop - PopMatters

exit through the gift shop ending a relationship

In his recent documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop (), British street artist is a concept of self-reference; it has nothing to do with one's relationship to others . . At the end of the film, in Banksy's last interview, he mentions one of the. Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film is a British documentary film, directed by street . world, to the utter confusion of both Fairey and Banksy. In an ending montage, Guetta insists that time will tell whether he is a real artist or not. Punk and consumerism have always had an uneasy relationship. Exit Through the Gift Shop is about punk art, so to speak – the street art At the end of the film, many of the street artists who encouraged Thierry to become.

It doesn't feel hyped, it doesn't seem to lie or exaggerate the happenings and the fact that an interesting, motivated and special character gets to portrait everything from an outside view is fascinating to watch.

exit through the gift shop ending a relationship

Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote. MisterWhiplash 15 May Exit Through the Gift Shop is credited as "a film by Banksy", who is a notorious and perhaps the most popular and widely acclaimed and the premiere provocateur in the group of street artists from the past several years. Yet his credit as director is something of a lark; he's never directed before, and he claims at the end of the film that this will be the last time he helps someone make a documentary on street artists.

exit through the gift shop ending a relationship

The bulk of the footage shot was by another artist or some would say 'so-called'Theirry Guetta, a former clothing store owner who used to take super-cheap and mis-made clothes and sell them for rocket-high prices as if they were designer wear, who started taping everything one day, just whatever was around him. Then, when his cousin, nicknamed 'Space Invader', took him around to show him how he put up his stenciled artwork around town, Thierry became enamored and followed anyone who would let him around town with his camera.

Soon, a documentary was looking like it was taking shape, but was it really? Thierry wasn't a filmmaker, and he wasn't an artist, but he went after doing both anyway, and it's him that Banksy makes the focus of, taking his masses of footage- most of it on street artists who remain anonymous only a few, like Shepard Fairey who made the red and blue Obama poster so iconic, go unblurred on camera - and telling this story of this Brain-Wash", a self-created art phenomenon that is basically a huge collection of Andy Warhol rip-off screen prints of celebrities how huge you might ask?

Well, there's a reason I kept thinking of Howard Hughes during the film, and a Spruce Goose comparison isn't far off. Banksy says at the start he didn't want Thierry doing a documentary on him since he didn't think he was very interesting, and turned the camera on his original documentarian instead.

Exit Through the Gift Shop - Wikipedia

I wonder though how much of this is really true, or perhaps just part of Banksy's own mystique; the guy is like The Shadow of street artists, with a touch of Tyler Durden. He pops up, does his thing, and leaves, trying to get by with his "gray-legal-area" artwork in Britain and elsewhere, and making waves with his real provocative pieces i.

He remains a shadow unto himself on screen, becoming like one of his stencils in a silhouette form and a voice muffled by distortion. But then again, he knows that he can only be so self-indulgent - how can he keep up, for example, with a guy like Thierry Guetta.

He is the real star of the film, and he really is one of a kind, a genuinely interesting "character" who sometimes, ala Howard Hughes, repeats things a bit too much, and like Michael Scott on the Office can seem to put himself in some awkward positions. He's also good in a crunch such as the Disneyland incidentand his very first piece of art- his own self-portrait as a guy with shaggy hair and a hat and a camera- was put all over town by himself and it's a genuinely good piece.

Exit Through The Gift Shop - UK Trailer

And his how he relates to others if interesting too; he takes some really long stretches of time from his family, and those he documents like Shepard Fairey don't know whether he's a genuinely good guy or just wacko, or both in a single bound. Certainly when he is finally let loose, by way of a gentle suggestion by Banksy, to create his own art it becomes like pushing a river-boat over a mountain: The reaction to his art, and how people see it in the film frankly I never heard of the guy, unlike Banksy, though I'm assuming he's a big deal in elite art circlesis mixed really.

A guy who just pours out hundreds of pieces of art and paintings right away instead of taking years for the craft? Such slippage is well known to Fairey, the artist who designed the iconic "Hope" poster for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and whose legal dispute with AP over copyright infringement was complicated when he admitted to faking evidence.

Exit Through the Gift Shop () - Exit Through the Gift Shop () - User Reviews - IMDb

And the question he raises here -- is there a difference between real and perceived power? Like everyone else in the documentary, Fairey has had interactions with its ostensible subject, Thierry Guetta. As described by director Banksywho appears in hoody and shadow, his voice electronically warped, Thierry "tried to make a film about me, but he was a lot more interesting than me, so now the film is kind of about him. Thierry, you learn from definitively ironic narrator Rhys Ifans, is a Frenchman living in Los Angeles with his family, owner of a vintage clothing store and video-camera aficionado: Following a series of indicative captures -- shopping adventures, mirror self-portraits with camera, toilet flushes -- the film reveals the subject that will lead Thierry into another world entirely, one that is especially in need of being captured -- the ephemeral world of street art.


Exit Through the Gift Shop and enter the mind of Banksy

In order to get access to more and more legendary artists, Thierry says, he decides he'll turn the hours and hours of footage into a documentary. Or at least that's what he tells his subjects, who agree to have him tag along here names are dropped, from Neckface to Dot Masters to Borf.

Some of them, like Fairey, appreciate Thierry's apparent dedication: Brief clips show Thierry's efforts to scale walls and follow Fairey onto rooftops.