Published in Filmonaut (monthly film periodical, circ. figure of 1000), June 2011, Zagreb.

Transcription

1 EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, d: Banksy, UK/USA, 2010 Published in Filmonaut (monthly film periodical, circ. figure of 1000), June 2011, Zagreb. OCD cameraman Thierry Guetta discovers the street-art scene and follows its protagonists, including Banksy, for years. After he doesn t succeed in making a documentary about it, Guetta tries to be an artist himself: an endeavour that culminates with a large bastard exhibition which sublimates imitations of artistic movements raging from Dada to abstract expressionism, from Pop to Street art. If you have read critiques of Banksy's movie or talked to people who have watched it, most of them will ponder on factuality of the story: is it a set-up?! This question is de-placed (except for a hard-boiled genre theorist, an obsessive structuralist, or a seeker for eternal truth and fire). ETTGS can be defined as a documentary, but its 'fixture' is more questionable due to Banksy's provoking prankster personality. The ironic title of the movie defines the author s position towards commercialised art. Museums, as holy spaces that define what art is, at the end of their tours end up with mandatory gift shops filled with art replicas, pens and calendars, as part of the illusion of the art work s aura. The story of ETTGS is centred on Thierry Guetta and his fantasy of becoming an artist, which in reality becomes everything but the standard learning of the craft and acquiring a style. He discovers that being an artist in a consumerist milieu is having connections, an ability to imitate, and skills to manipulate the media in a way that a hype atmosphere has to be created on the exhibition/event. As a commentator and the commentated Banksy hovers through the movie above Guetta s character as the author and the protagonist. Banksy is Guetta s antipode, almost a moral paradigm. His position of the author is dual: on one side it is self-ironic, on the other, the MTV montage and directing style gives spectacular images of street art and perpetuates Banksy s own image of the art terrorist : a renegade with a hood and altered voice, that further mystifies his persona and its belonging (subversive) hero narrative. Among other, ETTGS provokes the viewer to think through the concept of an art genius. If you believe that Guetta is not an artist because he prints his work for profit, you should study Dali and Rembrandt a bit. Yet again, if one believes that through Guetta s works Warhol and Pollock can be easily dismissed as hacks, I urge you to think again. Like with his hipster shop, Guetta simply applies the principle of symbolic de-contextualisation. His exhibition is

2 symptomatic for instant-art as a mixture of self-promotion and dilettantism that resides on basic non-understanding of what it imitates: the social context of the imitated. Money, as the main reference of evaluating art contributes to postmodern schism where the simplest techniques of montage and bricolage create de-contextualized pop-cultural references: functioning as fun stuff without critical and social sensibility. And what is specific for street art is its non-institutionalisation and short temporality as a part of a contextual protest. Thus the paradox of art under the patronage of market goes the furthest when we see how Banksy s and other street art end up at Sotheby s: Street art is there no more a counter-culture. Banksy s phone booth, just like Duchamps brilliant ready-made Fountain, is used as yet another legitimization moment for commercialised art. Making a movie is, like street art, a question of focus: a thing that Guetta lacks. A message cannot be mediated though an unsorted bundle of material. Thus, knowing what and when to say something is what makes Banksy exquisite: public graffiti, paintings or statues of immanent social significance as critiques of political systems or simple sarcastic messages create direct street communication because the artist can correctly assume what people care for (what matters!), with no need for institutionalised museum norms characterised by hermetic symbiosis of professional slang and profit triviality. If we come back to the starting essentialist question of the truthfulness of whether Thierry Guetta is real, we may existentialistically answer: yes! Meaning: it doesn t matter what Guetta s name really is, if he is an orphan or not, nothing changes his status of a paradigm that reveals how art as a commodity and its market function. ETTGS is a genre bastard and a multilayered narrative which provokes with its form. Considering the nature of the movie it was, and remained: a big set-up.

3 A SERIOUS MAN, Ethan & Joel Coen, USA, 2009 Full article published in Zarez (bi-weekly culture magazine circ. figure of 5000), July 2010, Zagreb. When you set Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty into the context of a small-town Jewish community in the mid-1960s America, you will get a peculiar mixture of grotesque, black humor and anxiety caused by questing one s faith and the meaning of life. The moral code and civil order are brought into question, and cinematic play with cultural and religious identities and stereotypes, such as the American dream and Jewish mysticism, is unavoidable. This is what A Serious Man, by the Coen brothers, has to offer. Why do bad things happen to a good man? The main character of the movie is a modern anti-hero Larry Gopnik, who leads a typical suburban life of the America s 60s: married, has two children, a picked-fence house and a steady job as a university math professor. He is a believer, an obedient member of the local Jewish community and in expectation of one the biggest family celebrations: his son s bar mitzvah. He is also in good health and can be considered a satisfied man. (After such an intro in a David Lynch movie the camera would start to descend into the ground full of worms). But, all of a sudden series of problems, that seem not his fault, storm down on him and turn his life around in such a manner that he resembles the modern character of Job. Questions arise in Larry s mind: what are the causes for this and why? So, he turns to seek the answers in religion, hoping that the Tora has the answers. Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you A Serious Man can be defined as Coen s typically Jewish and untypical film noir that simply expresses a complex urge to think through the basics of human knowledge. The Coens, again, prove that they are at their best in an undefined genre combination of black humour, grotesque, absurd and philosophical miss-matches. It offers a view of young secularized American Jews (as where the Coens themselves in the 60s) on the cultural gap between the rules of the older generations and the new American context that they have to adapt to. The gap that is huge and full of misunderstandings. The movie is also a paraphrase

4 of older Jewish literature (even Kafkian) placed into the modern American environment: an (un)spoken critique of the situation, as well as an eternal search for the meaning of (in) life. BROKEN EMBRACES, d: Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 2009 Full article published in Zarez (bi-weekly culture magazine, circ. figure of 5000), June 2010, Zagreb. The situation is this: a director and his main actress are in love from their first encounter, but a powerful and obsessively jealous producer of the film, with whom the actress lives, is in the way of their love. Sound familiar? Almost corny? It most definitely does, and great love affairs on screen always seem to work in a cliché manner: with a tragic or a happy end. But how does Pedro Almodovar handle this situation? The mentioned situation is the gist of the plot of Broken embraces Almodovar's latest movie (his 17th), his most expensive, as well as longest feature film. The taste left in the mouth after you consume it, is more of a celluloid tape then that of somebody s neck that we have been offered on former Almodovar s movies. Already in the opening scene, with frame-withinframe shots, we are reminded of the film illusion and its artificiality, by seeing the actors who had not yet stepped into their roles, but are already parts of the film fiction. The scene is followed by a shot of the eye close-up, a direct reference to the film camera as a recording device. Broken embraces are a combination of melodrama, comedy and film noir, by which Almodovar, more explicitly then before, tries to speak of himself, creating a partial alter-ego in the fictional director Harry Caine. Almodovar remains a classical storyteller who concentrates on the plot and the relations between the characters, passing on cinematic contemplations to other directors. Broken embraces, like other Almodovar s movies, does not emanate intellectualism or rationalism, but is dominated by archetypical emotions as love and jealousy, that remain simple and result in such practical actions as blackmail and revenge. The scenography and bright colours were emphasizing the excessiveness of the situation in Almodovar s former works, but in Broken embraces it is the artificiality of the plot that contributes more to the explicitness of the tragedy. In some moments, the movie resembles typical Hollywood melodramas, where the tragedy of life on screen overwhelms us with the illusion of its greatness, while needed almodovarian humor and absurdity, which reveal the

5 work of fictional conventions, are lacking. The main motivators of the plot are the emotions of the characters in a bewitched circle of love, jealousy and revenge. As the character Mateo says, in a parody scene, when young Diego is trying to write a script for a trash-vampire movie: We need a love story. What the tragic romance thriller Broken embraces has to offer the viewer is unhidden artificiality combined with typical film romance, along with ponderings on the nature of fiction films often through the director s auto-reference: all packed into an idealized, imaginary image of Spain. With the exquisite soundtrack by Albert Iglesias, flawless camera and montage set on perfectionist shots of (primarily) interiors, Broken embraces are a visual pleasure. And, as always, the final illusion of the movie is similar to the felling of the character blind Mateo who is touching the screen with the recording of his lover on it: the movie touches us as much as our own psychological references allow it, no matter what the play of the light on the screen exhibits.