Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

So there is this French guy.

And he loves to videotape everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.  After years of video-taping every moment of his life (The toilet! It flushes!) he stumbles upon a way to narrow down his focus: he begins taping street artists creating their work.

These artists don’t just do graffiti—they create almost flashy cultural commentary with prints and graphics on billboards and walls. Making art in this world sometimes involves Oceans 11-like planning and execution. It’s exciting, and dangerous, and not hard to figure out why Thierry soon became obsessed. They exist all over the world, know each other by the style their art takes.

Thierry gets “in” with many street artists, going with them at night to do their vigilante art, avoiding the cops, keeping a lookout, helping to create something millions of people would see and notice, or not notice. His ultimate goal, eventually, is to meet Banksy, a British street artist who was garnering fame all over the world for hanging one of his paintings in the London Tate without notice and creating art on the Berlin Wall. Thierry’s opportunity comes when Banksy visits LA and allows a very eager Theirry to tape his life—as long as he never shows Banksy’s face. Thus what we see of Banksy in the film is his hooded-sweatshirt-clad self and, in interviews, a blacked out face with digitally altered voice.

Getting a front row seat to this kind of art makes a great film, but, as we see, only with a good editor. To be privy to the secretive street art world, Thierry masquerades as a documentary filmmaker, when really, he’s just some guy with a camera and an obsession. When Banksy’s LA art show draws a massive crowd and media attention, and he fears too much spectacle (What did he expect having a painted elephant as a part of his gallery show?), he asks Thierry to deliver on his promise of a documentary, to show everyone what street art really was.

We only have to watch probably about 30 seconds of what Thierry edits his thousands of hours of film down to. It’s absolute torture. Banksy had to watch 90 minutes of it and I don’t know how he avoided either vomiting or dissolving into a seizure. He recognized then that Thierry was not as he claimed to be, and offered to work at editing the tapes while recommending Thierry dabble in street art a little on his own.

And my, Thierry does. He begins by creating street art, but then decides, after only six months, to have a gallery show of galactic proportions, like Banksy’s show times eleven. Now, with the camera out of his hands, he transfers his obsession to turning out massive amounts of art in order to open a show in weeks.

But Thierry “turning out” art is actually him telling his hired graphic designers and artists what to make. And they make it well, in a sort of art-factory. Four thousand people show up for the LA art opening, spend more than a million dollars on Thierry’s art, and spawn dissent and, probably, jealousy from the artists who once welcomed this strange mutton-chopped man into their secret world. We are led to question, as they are, what is art? Did the world fall for some sort of trick by finding meaning in Thierry’s mass-produced “art”? When interviewers ask Thierry questions about the meaning of the art and he can’t answer them with any depth or real meaning. He mumbles something unintelligible which ends with “And … I’m here!” as though that is enough.

It’s clear that Thierry is sort of faking it, just as he faked it as a documentary filmmaker, perhaps just as I fake it as a documentary reviewer who knows nothing about film. But at least I admit it.

Life in a Day (2011)

I started watching “Life in a Day” right before watching the Super Bowl. It’s the kind of film in which I could be featured, watching the Super Bowl and knitting, and it would seem like a beautiful life.

National Geographic  gave cameras to people in 192 countries and asked them to film their lives on July 24, 2010. Just record real life and let the images speak for themselves. It’s a simple, popular concept: people displaying life as it is. It’s artsy, it’s emotional, and it works.

They received over 4,500 hours of film. I can’t imagine the task of watching almost 190 DAYS WORTH of film editing it all down to fit in an hour and a half.

But they accomplished it, and what remains is beautiful. Everything, under an expensive lens and gorgeous editing, becomes intriguing and remarkable, from the first pee in the morning to cracking an egg onto a hot frying pan, from nursing a child in the dark to riding an elevator in the pre-dawn darkness.

The movie begins in the early morning and features rituals, familiar and unfamiliar, that take place throughout the day. They answer simple questions, like what do you love? What do you fear? They document sleep, food, work, love, children, violence, disease. Or, in a word, humanity.

Despite being captivated by the movie, it made me melancholy. There is something kind of bleak in all of the beauty, and after thinking about it, I believe it is this: it made me achingly aware of my own insignificance. So many people love and fear the same things I do. To imagine the billions of people in the world, afraid of death like I am, or in love like I am, makes my own fears and loves seem less unique.

The movie ends with night falling  on the eve of July 24. A girl, filming herself sitting in her car, expresses basically the same sentiment I just did. “I don’t want to just disappear,” she says.

After thinking it over more, I found a way to make myself feel better. The only way to not disappear, to matter among billions,  is to matter to a few.

Waiting for Superman (2010)

This is the first documentary I watched, recommended to me by my brother. It was an eye-opener, and motivated this documentary obsession and subsequent blogging you are privy to.

Waiting for Superman takes on the flawed public education system. A blemish on America’s skin, a problem every president for years has vowed to fix.

Yet this film, at its heart, is about the kids affected by a flawed system. We meet five children struggling through their public schools and are presented with a map of the path laid out for them. These kids have so much hope (Daisy wants to be a doctor and veterinarian, Anthony, who can’t be more than ten, wants a better life for his own kids) , but if statistics ring true, they will possibly never be proficient in math or reading, not graduate, and not go to college.

The film informs about the problems with the public school system and the attempts at solving them.  Before this movie, I knew nothing about teachers unions. That through their union contracts, teachers receive tenure after only two years of teaching. After that, they virtually cannot be fired, despite not teaching at all, or not teaching well. Principals and school boards who long for their kids to learn can’t do anything about horrible teachers in their classrooms.

Geoffrey Canada, an enigmatic educator, from whose interviews the movie title is born, believes there is a solution. Charter  schools free public schools with carefully selected teachers and small class sizes, give kids a chance, sometimes a guarantee, of success. No child slips through the cracks or enters high school with a third grade reading level. They graduate with the education necessary to get into college. It seems like a big promise to say that every child in charter school will succeed, but the statistics show that charter school works: we just need more of them.

It all comes down to luck. Charter school law requires a lottery be held when there are more applicants than there are spaces in charter schools. And spaces, we see, are very limited. The number of spaces left tick down at the bottom of the screen as we watch the faces of the five kids and their parents, their futures decided by bingo balls and drawing names from a hat.

While watching this movie, I was led to look at my own education, and see my background in stark relief to the children in the film. I grew up in the suburbs, where schools have much less of the problems plaguing city schools. My family could afford to send me to a private school until high school, when I chose to transfer to the local public school. It was never a question of whether or not I would graduate and go to college—I took it for granted. I grew up with privilege, the thought of going to a “drop-out” factory or needing to get into a charter school to get a good education never crossed my mind, as it already has the minds of these kids.

This film does an incredible job of taking a huge issue like public education and humanizing it by letting the viewers get to know just five of the children affected by it. When I saw the amount of spaces greatly outnumbered by the number of applicants, your hope for the featured child dwindles. By learning their histories and their families, knowing their ambitions and seeing that public education works against them to get there, this film makes the viewer care. And isn’t that the point?