1. Are Exit Through the Gift Shop and Grass long commercials or documentaries? Use the reviews posted in Moodle on Exit Through the Gift Shop and on Grass as your stating point to express your view.
Both Exit Through the Gift Shop and Grass depict controversial societal issues through a specific, biased lens. Both films are classified as documentaries, which is a film “based on or re-creating an actual event, era, life story, etc., that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements”1. However, the subjective, persuasive lenses in the films may suggest that they are merely long commercials, where a commercial is defined as “an advertisement or promotional announcement”2.
Both films purport to tell the an objective truth and use evidence, such as the L.A. Weekly story about Guetta in Exit and the source material in Grass, to support their claims. However, the decisions made by each filmmaker skillfully present the facts in a subjective manner, thereby limiting the films’ ability to present facts accurately. At the end of Exit, the viewer is left convinced that individuals like Guetta have ruined street art; at the end of Grass, the viewer is critically evaluating if marijuana should be decriminalized. Accordingly, the films serve as avenue to promote a particular perspective.
Grass’ use of graphics and a progressive “truth about marijuana” frames the film in a method similar to that of an advertisement. Exit’s structure (in which the film appears to be about Banksy then takes a turn onto Guetta) facilitates the juxtaposition of Guetta and true artists, rather than depicting the true story of street art.
