I have finally gotten around to seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, which received New York Film Critics Online award for best documentary of 2010. Some critics see it as a mockumentary in the style of “Catfish”. The movie has been described as a satire on art world trendiness, one of my favorite topics. Since it also addresses the question of “truth and fiction” in documentary film—the chief obsession of Jane Gaines, the self-described Marxist film professor whose class on documentary film I dropped like a hot potato after finally realizing where she was going—I felt I owed it to myself to have a gander.
After weighing in on this highly regarded film that has a 98 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I will say a few words about “Cinema Verite”, the HBO fictional treatment of the making of “An American Family”, the 1973 PBS documentary about the Louds of Santa Barbara. If cinéma vérité implies a detached fly-on-the-wall approach to its subject matter, then “An American Family” was anything but. As is the case with “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, you are dealing very much with a staged reality, even if director Banksy would never admit it as such. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/exit-through-the-gift-shop-cinema-verite/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
