Howl (2010, d. Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman)
I saw these two films on back-to-back nights, and it worked out to be a seredipitously well-matched pair. Both are films about art: what is art, and who gets to decide whether it is so? Who is the arbiter of this mysterious quality that makes art admirable: is it the artist, the cultured audience, or the man on the street?
Both purport to be based on real stories, ostensibly centring around a 'real life personage', an artist (arguably). In Howl, which is composed of overlapping layers of transcripts - a poetry reading of Howl, an interview with the poet, court proceedings - we are given a glimpse of Allen Ginsberg in the period just after the 1955 publishing of his seminal work. In Exit Through the Gift Shop, we are introduced to Thierry Guetta, a French-American man who becomes a LA art personality through his connections with well-known street artists, including Banksy.
The men draw us in, but the stories are really about their works and the arguments over the legitimacy of their work as art. Howl is challenged as an 'obscene' work in the US courts in 1957, though Ginsberg himself is not on trial but his publisher instead. The case hinges on the use of obscene words; the prosecution takes to asking if certain words - cock, balls, blown and so on - are 'necessary' to the poem, if it reduces the artistic merit by being so crude. The issue debated in the court case is really whether art only qualifies as worthwhile if it is morally uplifting. Howl is also derided as illegitimate for its free form jazz rhythms, for not having conventional form and thus, lacking function.
Howl the film approaches this all with a lovely sincerity. It believes in Howl the poem being art, as an true expression of emotion, both of Ginsberg's personal feelings, and that of the human condition. The film is part factual logic - the recreation of the court case with its facts and expert opinions and the final judgement - and part poetic expressiveness, through the double rereadings of the poem; Ginsberg (as ably portrayed by James Franco) performing Howl for the first time in a cramped room full of friends and fans, and a second recitation married with Eric Drooker's illustrations brought to life in simple but fluid animation. It is not a biopic about Ginsberg, choosing only to focus on a sliver of time, with short flashbacks to give historical background to relevant periods of Ginsberg's life. We are introduced to some central characters to Ginsberg's personal life and artistic growth: his institutionalised mother, good friends and fellow Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, his partner Peter Orlovsky and the beleagered publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but we never hear them speak. The words that matter are Ginsberg's, and the words that matter most are the words of Howl the poem. I think it's a particularly fine film because of this narrow focus; it's very satsifying in its passion about the poem and in its defence of it as literature.
Meanwhile, Exit Through the Gift Shop begins just before the new millenium, as Guetta begins documenting the street art movement after filming his cousin in France, the mosaic artist 'Invader', for kicks. After he finally makes contact with the elusive and now infamous Banksy, who admits Guetta into the inner workings of his art process, Guetta is first challenged by Banksy to turn his years of footage into a street art documentary - which we are led to believe is an abject failure due to Guetta's lack of talent - and then to hold his own art show. Guetta is then painted as an art monster of sorts, with Banksy his remorseful Frankenstein, as Guetta becomes a 'star' with his derivative pop/street art mashups and proclivity for hype, an unfortunate triumph of style over substance.
But it's all very tongue-in-cheek, to the point of insincerity. Exit Through the Gift Shop, as a piece of art itself, adheres strictly to the documentary film form, but its tone is arch, the intention satire. Banksy, or a shadowy figure purporting to be Banksy, bemoans the instant, seemingly undeserved success of Guetta - or rather his alter ego Mr Brainwash - as one who hasn't paid his dues to the gruelling process of artistry, who has piggybacked on the art and talent and hard work of others, who's in it for the money and the fame. It seems that Banksy is positioning himself - and other street artists - in opposition, as the artists' establishment; and this, then, is the true driving force behind the film. Exit ... is not about Guetta, Exit... is about Banksy and his attempt to outsmart his critics.
All art is commercial to some extent, and in a remix culture, is there any true originality in art? 'Invader' takes the cultural familiarity of the Space Invader monsters and positions them in unexpected, mundane contexts; Shepard Fairey takes Andre the Giant's mug and plasters it across the world in endless repetition. How are these men any more artists than Guetta? How is Banksy, with his talent for provocative statements to attract media attention and commodification, any less a 'sell-out' than Mr Brainwash? The film is both irritatingly smug on this point as it is endlessly fascinating and interested in teasing out these ideas of artistic (and the artist's) superiority; slyly contesting the right of the establishment to be the arbiter of what is art, all while challenging our ability (as supposed man on the street) to understand and judge this issue.
As the film progresses, as we're led to believe that Guetta is more than a deluded by harmless man with a camera but rather a monster of Banksy's unintentional making. But I think the true monster is this movie, and Banksy is unabashedly proud of his deliberate creation because he gets to show how clever he is. He says, in the film, "art is a bit of a joke". His 'former spokesperson' muses on Guetta's meteoric rise on the same theme, saying, "The joke's on...I don't know who the joke's on. Maybe there is no joke." That's disingenuous. There is a joke, and it's not the art or whether we're laughing at Guetta or the rueful Banksy during the film. The movie is a critical success, and making good money for an indie film; and so, the joke is really on us, the audience, as Banksy laughs it up all the way to cultural and artist supreriority AND to the bank.
Exit Through the Gift Shop may be an entertaining and thought-provoking film, but for all that it's hard to like. I much preferred Howl, and its warm way of championing contentious art. Howl is a flawed but lovingly crafted small gem; Exit Through the Gift Shop is a flashy diamond that can't shake the fact it's a lump of coal at heart.
