Eric Williams
370U
Exit Strategy
“It’s not
Gone with the Wind , but there’s probably a moral in there somewhere.”
-Banksy
Documentary filmmaking has established a common dialogue between filmmakers and audiences that conveys a particular sense of an honest depiction of reality. The conventions employed in this category have become widely accepted forms of realism that have consequently been interpreted as the aforementioned reality. As audiences have become accustomed to being presented with such a believable experience, they may not be as able to be skeptical of the format that they are presented with. Due to this phenomenon, the documentary form has been utilized by the more clever filmmakers with ulterior motives for covert and potentially misleading purposes. This concept that complicates the world of documentary filmmaking has been reinvigorated by the recent film Exit Through the Gift Shop(2010), which while it technically presents itself as a conventional, straightforward documentary, appears to only be a clever disguise for something more devious.
OVERVIEW
Exit Through the Gift Shop , critically well received and nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2010, is a film credited to a mysterious figure known simply as Banksy. This individual who the film is ascribed to is not a filmmaker, but the most notorious artist in the world. He is an extremely elusive figure whose

distinctive style of graffiti art has been featured on a number of international streets, as well as galleries and auctions at Sotheby‘s. Banksy’s style of art is sardonic, irreverent, and obviously subversive, but is mature and intelligent in its critiques of issues including politics, religion, art, and celebrity. With Exit , there is an attempt to peel back some of the layers that have obscured the world of street art and its best known character in
Banksy, which by the end of the film only appears to be some sort of underhanded ruse.
The film follows a French émigré named Thierry Guetta who, obsessed with capturing every moment of his life on videotape, stumbles into documenting the burgeoning movement of street art. His introduction to the scene begins through an association with his cousin Space Invader, which leads to numerous leads following other street artists, most notably, a young Shepard Fairey. As Thierry gets more involved with these artists, his supposedly budding documentary on street art eventually leads him to the centerpiece of the movement, Banksy. However, after finally getting Banksy as the most important piece for his documentary, Thierry edits together an incoherent flickering catastrophe, and his artistic abilities and documentary intentions are put into question.
At this point in the story, Banksy takes over Thierry's footage and proceeds to rework the street art documentary into an actual film. During the same time, Thierry, having been so involved with the street art world, now begins to emulate the work that he had been compulsively “documenting” for so long after a suggestion from Banksy. The film then follows Thierry and his incarnation, Mr. Brainwash, as he begins to take over the Los Angeles art scene. Mr. Brainwash completes an immensely successful art show in
L.A. and attains a great deal of wealth and fame for his work. The film concludes with several artists, including Banksy himself, commenting on the phenomenon of Mr.

Brainwash and some of the repercussions of Thierry's presence within that specific art community.
Exit Through the Gift Shop works within the common documentary form, and appears on the surface to be a fairly honest look into a little known world. It takes a distant viewpoint and allows its characters to speak for themselves without much outside judgment. (Well, at least not evident judgment.) The film utilizes the familiar documentary style of interviews, handheld intimate camera footage, and most notably, the omniscient English narrator(Rhys Ifans) who watches over the overall story. These common conventions aid in creating a structured narrative and simultaneously, a plausible sense of reality. Although the film succeeds on the level of documentary expectation, and there doesn‘t seem to be anything the matter, it almost imperceptibly is criticizing the world and certain individuals in which it seems to be sympathetic about.
BLURRING THE LINES
Exit Through the Gift Shop is not the type of film that blatantly mocks or satirizes its intended target like other such films that fall under the mockumentary, or fake documentary category. It doesn't at any point overtly poke fun or criticize any number of the themes that it deals with in an explicitly comedic style other mockumentaries have become synonymous with. However, a film like Exit has more in common with a piece like Mitchell Block's No Lies(1974) , than other “legitimate” documentaries. Both of these works never directly states its intentions, and succeeds purely because it manipulates the spectators expectations of the form and the content that should be packed within. There

seems to be little hints that signal something else important about the film as well.
One of these clues that announces to the viewer that something might be slightly off, is the presence of the filmmaker throughout. It is evident that Thierry is the original cameraperson responsible for the graffiti footage and attempted documentary that is established early in the film. His voice can be heard and he can be seen in many sections that he himself has shot. However, in contrast, the other parts of the film, which make up the majority of it, are managed by an unknown person who’s identity is never revealed.
There is someone else who is conducting the interviews and gathering footage, and the viewpoint is constantly changing from known to unknown storytellers. This shifting perspective is disorienting leaving the viewer wondering about the driving force of the film.
Another aspect that hints at or camouflages the film’s intentions is the involvement of Banksy himself. There is no real validation or proof that the masked marauder had any part with anything outside of his relationship with Thierry. At the point where Banksy takes over the footage, there is never again any mention of the street art documentary; which is most likely because it had evolved into Exit Through the Shop , a piece which bears little resemblance to a documentary solely about street art. This repurposing of the graffiti video into Exit is explained by Banksy in his introduction as being purely because Thierry was more interesting than he was, and so the focus of the piece had shifted to the Frenchman, an explanation that comes off as a poor excuse.
The presence of the filmmaker, like a Michael Moore or Peter Jackson, and the lack of validity and reasoning behind the creation of the film, are sidestepped through the incorporation of a mythic figure like Banksy because his anonymity is already

understood. These and other aspects, which while not necessarily tropes of mockumentary, do raise many other questions about what is actually being presented and the credibility of its intentions.
ANALYSIS
Exit Through the Gift Shop cannot be confidently labeled as a documentary because on one level or another it is abusing the form and drawing attention to itself, and not upholding the sort of honest relationship between filmmaker and spectator addressed earlier. This position is thus ironic seeing as how such a film was nominated in the documentary category for an Oscar. Although the film cannot be labeled as a mockumentary without some discomfort as well, it is definitely operating in an equally vague area. This is something that Alisa Lebow contributes to the inability of defining the documentary, which makes it difficult to define the mockumentary as its antithesis.
A film like Exit , regardless of the label, is playing with expectations, and a passage from Lebow phrases things quite nicely:
Whether to deceive, amuse, challenge, propagandize, or reenact, these films do much more than merely adopt documentary techniques for their own mischievous( or even conservative) purposes. Insofar as mockumentaries mimic documentary, they implicitly contaminate it at the level of its generic status, revealing the impurity of the category itself. If there can be said to be any necessarily subversive implication of mockumentary practice, it would be this: as with all effective imitations, it reveals the performative limits of the original.

(231)
This relationship that Lebow discusses between the documentary and mockumentary are important in understanding film as a medium itself, and as a means of not allowing a genre to parade itself as being more truthful than others. The mockumentary is functioning as a critique of the credibility of documentaries, and a film like Exit is straddling that line by pushing the boundaries and indirectly questioning the purpose of the documentary. Neither of these categories of film are really truthful, even “based on documentary’s ’cozier’ relationship to reality-i.e., that which is always at a distinct remove” (Lebow 227).
CONCLUSION
Many critics have proposed the possibility that the entire construct of Thierry
Guetta's Mr. Brainwash is a hoax perpetrated by Banksy himself, but that only appears to be a clever escape away from something that is apparent within the format and content of the film. Obviously there are different interpretations about the meaning of the film, which is (if you’ve read up to this point) extremely difficult to pin down. And of course, any good work of art should mean different things to different people or ultimately it has failed in some respects. So what is this film really about, and why is it not a documentary?
The film at its heart seems to be a story about the high degree of honor amongst artists who work within, as Banksy puts it, "a legal gray Area". There is an apparent camaraderie and code which is necessary within a select world of illegal work. The film

is not directly about celebrity or the art itself as it may look on the surface, although those are important thematic elements, but it is more about how one person invited into the most exclusive movement in the world ended up exploiting the work of the individuals who had been generous enough to trust someone to document their passion.
This criticism of Mr. Brainwash’s success due solely to his relationship to Banksy and Fairey is what Exit is commenting on. The moral alluded to in the quote at the outset of this essay is that the destruction of trust will not be tolerated without retaliation. The predominate intention of Exit looks to expose the betrayal of Banksy and other artists by
Thierry, a person whom was entrusted with valuable secrets, and who ultimately profited from someone else’s hard work. Thierry as Mr. Brainwash used the reputation of Banksy and Fairey to unfairly boost the status of his own artwork, which by the end of the film, it is easy to see has upset everyone and no one wants anything to do with Mr. Brainwash any longer.
The documentary form deployed in Exit Through the Gift Shop allows for a sneaky “fuck you” to someone who abused a friendship without such a commentary being the focus of the project. By working within the mode of realism, the film is afforded an opportunity to make a cleverly concealed personal attack look like a factual account of street art and a couple of artists working in such a style. As Lebow points out, there is no real solid contract for documentary, but there is an unspoken one that is continually being torn to shreds. Through Exit , and similar pieces, we can begin to see that documentaries and mockumentaries are two sides of the same coin; and even though we may not be able to accurately confine visual works to a proper definition, we should still be aware that we never really agreed to the terms of the documentary contract.

Works Cited
Exit Through the Gift Shop . Dir. Banksy. Perf. Thierry Guetta, Banksy, Rhys Ifans.
Paranoid Pictures, 2010.
Lebow, Alisa. F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. Ed. Alexandra
Juhasz & Jesse Lerner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2006.
No Lies. Dir. Mitchell Block. Perf. Shelby Leverington, Alec Hirschfeld. 1974.