By: Geoffrey Yonil

As the recondite title suggests, the oddity of the Oscar-nominated documentary continues throughout the movie. And while I’ve never been a big fan of documentaries (preferring for a film to provide an escape from reality), Exit Through the Gift Shop continually intrigued me from beginning to end. At first, I expected a film about street art especially with regards to the elusive international figure Banksy—seeing how he supposedly directed the film—but was delightfully captivated by the characterization of the film’s main protagonist, Thierry Guetta (a French immigrant to the States) and his journey through the underground counter-culture of graffiti.

Guetta, an oddity and novelty himself, documented every waking hour with a video camera no matter what the occasion was. Troubled by the death of his mother at a young age, Guetta resolved himself to capturing and immortalizing the lives of his family and friends in hours upon hours of uncensored and unedited home movies. This eventually led him back to France where he caught up with his cousin Invader—a graffiti artist who had grown a reputation for wheatpasting replications of the figures from the 70’s arcade game Space Invaders all throughout Paris. While following his cousin through the streets at night, Guetta developed a keen interest in graffiti. And it was through his constant documentation of everything around him that led him to meet some of the most well-known names within the graffiti art world, without any believable explanation or transitions, including Shepard Fairey (the artist who did the Obama Hope posters and the OBEY wheatpastings), Zev, Swoon, and the ultra-anonymous Banksy, among other even more esoteric and obscure anonymous figures.

Taking the viewer from tragedy to comedy and then something in between—something we’ll call tragicomedy for short—Exit Through the Gift Shop does so much more than your average documentary. And while I had expected a resolution at the end, the film leaves me questioning not only the existence of Guetta but the entire world of graffiti (possibly even my entire existence). With absurd commentary, disturbing images, and a tone of the elusive, Exit Through the Gift Shop is sure to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.