Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tunenut (A) on May 02, 2010 at 17:44:52

This is a very strange and fascinating documentary, that may or may not be a big hoax, nobody seems to know. It purports to tell the story of a rather bizarre French citizen living in Los Angeles, who picked up a weird quirk of filming his whole life with a video camera.

Through a relative, this strange obsessive met a group of artists who did "street art," that is similar to graffiti, art installed on public streets and walls late at night illegally and with other risks involved, such as climbing buildings.

Was this really a big thing? Did it really even happen?

Eventually, the French camera nut meets the king of street art, Banksy, who is the maker of this documentary. And through Banksy, the French camera nut becomes an artist himself, and alledgedly sells his Warhol lookalike art for tens of thousands of dollars per piece.

What is real here? I have no idea. I do know it's a fairly brilliant construction of a world where silk screens of Elvis Presley holding toy guns sell to art collectors for big bucks. As one of the interviewees says, it may be a joke, but I'm not sure who the joke is on. Or maybe that's the real world we live in.

At any rate, I've never seen anything quite like it. Perhaps I was also conned by Banksy and he is making more money from me. But at least I got a couple of hours of good entertainment out of it.