Banksy’s documentary about the man who tried to make a documentary about him is quick, funny and sharper about the art market than most films made inside it. Whether it is true is a question it enjoys rather more than we did.
Banksy has directed a film, and the first thing he does in it is explain that it is not about him. A Frenchman with a camcorder spent years trying to make a documentary about him, Banksy says from under a hood, his voice run through a distorter, and the footage turned out to be about the Frenchman instead. So Banksy has made that film. It is 86 minutes, it is funny nearly all the way through, and it has more to say about how art gets priced than most films made by people who price it. It is also the best marketed artist of his generation making a film about the evils of marketing, and we never quite stopped noticing.
The Frenchman is credited as Mr. Brainwash, for reasons the second half explains, and he arrives on screen as a walking hazard: wide-eyed, mutton-chopped, filming his children, his shop, his breakfast, his own sleeping face. He has thousands of tapes and has labelled none of them. Tom Fulford and Chris King, the editors, went through those boxes, and the first half hour, built from what they found, is the best stretch in the film. His cousin INVADER glues mosaics to Paris walls at three in the morning while the camera runs; Shepard Fairey lets him up ladders on Los Angeles rooftops. Nobody else was recording any of this, because it was made to be scrubbed off by the council, and here it is.
Banksy himself is on screen more than he lets on. The hood and the altered voice are a joke he keeps a straight face through, and he is dry company: a man who finds most things about his own fame faintly embarrassing and says so in short sentences. Steve Lazarides, who was selling his work at the time, describes what the pieces started fetching with the expression of someone who still cannot believe it. Rhys Ifans narrates in a flat, amused Welsh murmur that never oversells a line, which is the right choice for a film in which nearly everyone else is overselling something. Geoff Barrow’s music is low, slow and slightly menacing, and gives the night shoots the pulse of a heist.
The turn comes when Banksy, worn down by what the Frenchman has cut together, suggests he put the camera down and try making some art of his own. What happens next fills the second half and we will not describe it, except to say that it involves a large building in Los Angeles and a queue. We laughed a great deal at his first efforts, and then, watching him talk about them with complete sincerity, felt a little ashamed of laughing, because he is plainly not in on any joke, and the film knows it and keeps rolling. That discomfort is the most interesting thing in it. Nobody on screen ever tells him to stop.
Whether any of it is true has been argued since the first screenings, and the film is happier with the argument than we were. If the Frenchman is a plant, this is a well-built prank about how little the people who buy art know about it. If he is real, it is a documentary that watches a naive man get built up and does not much mind. Either way the joke lands on the collectors and the press, and never on the man in the hood, who did after all set the whole thing going. The film’s history of street art also begins roughly when Fairey and Banksy did, as if nothing had been painted on a wall before, and anyone who remembers the trains will find that thin.
As a first film it is better made than it needs to be. Fulford and King cut fast, the archive is rare, the sit-down interviews are short, and 86 minutes goes by without a slack patch. Set against the run of artist documentaries, which tend to be reverent and long, it is neither, and it talks about money in a way those films almost never do. Watch it with someone who already has an opinion about Banksy. You will find out within twenty minutes which of you is the collector.
