‘Exit Through the Gift Shop,’ a great documentary that might not be a documentary at all, turns 15

In 2010, Thierry Guetta made a movie about Banksy — or was it the other way around?

The premise of the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop — which arrived in April of 2010, 15 years ago this month — is well-known: French-American filmmaker and clothing shop proprietor Thierry Guetta became interested in the street art scene, including the likes of Banksy and Shepard Fairey, as Banksy came to the United States and started doing street art in Los Angeles.

Guetta spent many years filming a documentary about them- even as Banksy himself remained, as he has to this day, anonymous, and only ever interviewed in silhouette and with voice modulation.

Eventually, Guetta put together the footage into a rough cut of a documentary, which Banksy denounced as “unwatchable.” So Banksy decided to take over the footage- and around the same time, Guetta had made his entry into the street art world, under a new persona called “Mister Brainwash.”

So essentially, to use a wrestling analogy, it was the documentary equivalent of Bret Hart and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s double turn at Wrestlemania XIII- the documentarian and the subject gradually switched sides, with Guetta starting to make a documentary about Banksy, but the roles eventually reversed, with Banksy becoming the filmmaker and Guetta becoming the subject (Banksy has the lone directorial credit.)

Of course, there’s a chance that this “double turn” had something else in common with its WWE counterpart: It may not have been entirely on the level.

There has long been speculation, although never quite proven, that Exit Through the Gift Shop was an elaborate hoax, and it didn’t quite go down the way the film presents it. This is mostly because Banksy is known, above all, as a prankster, and making a documentary that wasn’t really what it seemed is in line with what he’s all about.