Friday 5th until Thursday 25th March 2010 @ Watershed, Bristol

Not content with dominating the art world, it seems the infamous Banksy has now turned his hand to cinema. On the face of it, his film, Exit Through The Gift Shop, is a colourful documentary about the rise of street art and its explosion in popularity over the last 5-10 years. We’ve got interviews with several of the big players (and some of the smaller ones), tales of their exploits and narrated segments of various “key” moments in the scene’s (and Banksy’s) history like the spraying of the West Bank wall and the placing of a Guantanamo Bay detainee model in Disneyland. Holding all this documenting together is the story of one man, a certain Thierry Guetta, and how his love of street art slowly took over his life and changed it beyond recognition.

While most of the material on show here will be nothing new to anyone who has kept half an eye on street art’s recent progress and although we learn nothing new about Banksy himself, there is some remarkable and truly breathtaking footage of artists hanging off bridges and clambering over high rooftops, risking their lives to get at walls with spray-cans.

What’s really interesting about the film though is how we get to intimately see the sudden rise to fame of a new graffiti artist, leaving other artists who have been honing their style over a lifetime in his wake. The film manages to draw subtle parallels between the instant and short-lived nature of street art and that of the celebrity culture around it (and possible celebrity status in general). ‘Some art is cast in bronze to last for 100 years,’ Banksy muses, his voice distorted but still with a thick Bristolian twang, ‘street art could last only a few days or hours.’ It’s this sort of stuff I really wanted to see much more of in the film and I could have done without all the chronicles of Guetta.

In Banksy’s own words; ‘It’s not Gone With The Wind’ – but hell, it’s pretty interesting. Oh, that and it’s proper, proper funny.

www.banksyfilm.com

Matthew Whittle www.matthewwhittleblog.blogspot.com