Guetta has one screen credit and he is the reason it exists. In Exit Through the Gift Shop he is the amateur who filmed the street artists nobody else bothered with, then became the subject; the film is at its best when the footage is his.
Fi1m perspective
He never puts the camera down. In Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) Guetta films his breakfast, his shop, his children and his own face asleep, and when he follows his cousin Invader out to glue mosaics to Paris walls at three in the morning, he films that too. There is no framing to speak of and no plan. What there is, hour after hour, is a man who cannot bear to let anything go unrecorded, and that turns out to be the most useful thing anyone could have been doing on those rooftops.
The shape is quickly told. Born in France in 1966, he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and ran vintage clothing shops, and from the late 1990s he spent his nights taping street artists, Invader first, then Shepard Fairey, then around 2006 Banksy himself. He is credited in the film as Mr. Brainwash, the name under which he opened his first large show, Life is Beautiful, in Los Angeles in 2008, and a second in New York in 2010. The film covers how he got from one to the other, and it does so in a way we will not spoil.
On screen he is a hazard. Wide-eyed and mutton-chopped, he seems in every scene about to knock something over, and the film gets most of its laughs from him. We laughed. Then, somewhere in the first half hour, watching Fairey let him up a ladder on a Los Angeles rooftop in the dark, we stopped and felt something closer to gratitude, because this footage exists only because a man with no judgement about what mattered kept the tape running. Tom Fulford and Chris King, the editors, made a film out of thousands of unlabelled tapes, and the best stretch of it is his.
Whether any of it is true is another matter. There has been speculation since the film opened that the whole rise was arranged by Banksy as a joke on the art market, and Guetta has answered the question without closing it. "Banksy captured me becoming an artist," he said in 2011. "In the end, I became his biggest work of art." As for the art itself, the bright colours and borrowed pictures, made with teams of assistants and designers, it is widely called derivative of the people he used to film. We have not reviewed a show and will not judge one here.
So this is a view of one credit, and an odd one. We do not expect a second film. If there is one, we hope somebody else holds the camera and he is left to do the thing he does best, which is to walk into the frame without noticing it is there.
Biography
Thierry Guetta, known professionally as Mr. Brainwash, is a French street artist and former videographer based in Los Angeles. Born on 31 January 1966 in Garges-lès-Gonesse, France, he moved to the United States as a teenager. He initially worked in event promotion and owned vintage clothing stores before becoming an amateur filmmaker who documented street artists including his cousin Invader, Shepard Fairey and Banksy.
Guetta appears as himself in the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by Banksy. The film follows his transition from videographer to artist under the Mr. Brainwash moniker. His debut solo exhibition, Life Is Beautiful, took place in Los Angeles in 2008. He has since created album artwork, including for Madonna's Celebration (2009), and mounted further exhibitions and public installations.
