Friday, March 26, 2010

brainwash

Last summer, the full force of super-charged Banksy hype hit upon Britain. As a sprayer, Banksy had gained notoriety for his foolhardy stunts and inventive grafs, but his fame hadn't spread beyond a small minority. But when, out of nowhere, Bristol's City Museum let Banksy desecrate its hallowed halls with spray cans, cardboard stencils and disrespect for the orthodoxy, the crowds streamed in, and his name was in everyone's mouth. The exhibition set the region ablaze, and people happily spent four hours or more in a line to see what it was that everyone was talking about. It was a scream.

I loved the show, and I love Banksy's graffiti for their creativity, irony and fun, but also the skilled and daring execution. When I heard that a Banksy film featured at Sundance, I was all excited. It's been a while since I lived next door to the festival, but I knew I'd catch the film in a theater sooner or later. About a month ago, an official poster advertising it went up in the tunnel connecting the Science Museum and South Kensington Station. March 5th, it said.

Before that was the Berlin Film Festival, which also ran Exit Through the Gift Shop, as the film is called, but did one better than Sundance: It promised a speech by the intangible sprayer-turned-filmmaker. The art world was abuzz. Would his scrupulously guarded anonymity be lifted? No, the speech was prerecorded, the frames filled with a black silhouette jabbering with an electronically altered voice. Never mind – the critics like the film.

The trailer doesn't do the film justice, and neither does this little synopsis: A Frenchman living in Los Angeles who runs a vintage clothing store and captures every moments of his life on video runs into a bunch of street artists. He starts filming them and gets sucked into their world. First, he just documents what's happening around him, but soon enough he's out there with them as assistant and side-kick.

By chance, he meets Banksy whose confidence he gains by skill, perseverance and sheer madness. Banksy pushes him to edit his endless reels of tape into a film but doesn't like the result. He decides to make the film himself and, to get the persistent Frenchman off his back, encourages him to try art instead. The madman becomes Mr. Brainwash, fills a vacant TV studio in LA with his pieces and becomes an art world sensation overnight. Banksy is pissed, as are the other sprayers he used to film.

The film, in other words, is a documentary, and it's exceedingly well done. The magic of street art and the mystique of Banksy permeate the film but are never revealed. The narration is spot on, and the comments made by the protagonists are hilarious. Towards the end, Banksy points out that everything is just one big joke, but he can't decide who or what it is on. To me, the biggest appeal of the film lay in its total irreverence towards everyone and everything, Banksy very much included.

I left the theater bouncing with laughter and thoroughly engrossed in the world of Banksy, and then I did something strange. I took the tube back home. Normally I walk; the cinema is just around the corner. But the cinema just around the corner didn't show Exit Through the Gift Shop, nor did the majority of London's theaters. I had to trek down to Wimbledon to catch a showing, really bizarre after the hype of last summer.

On the train home, the film was still in my rioting in my head, and with distance I started wondering. Was this thing real or was it just a big sham? Was Banksy himself manning the projector, laughing himself to the floor with every new scene that the audience took at face value?

Thierry Guetta, the mad Frenchman, was traumatized as a child when he missed the moment of his mom's death. He sprouted a camera and started filming constantly, vowing never to lose a moment again. This may be good material for a psychology text book but perhaps just a bit too much for reality. Then I realized that the rising art star chooses Mr. Brainwash as nom d'artiste. It can't really be any more obvious, can it? The thick French accent and even thicker muttonchops, patiently slow-cooked for maximum impact, are just a disguise. Mr. Brainwash is Banksy, if not physically than at least metaphorically. Mr. Brainwash was created for the purpose of making the film, and the big exhibition in LA probably financed it. And the man without a name keeps laughing at whoever takes him seriously.

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