The Best Documentaries of 2010

(photos of Joan Rivers, top, and Banksy)

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat, 12-29-2010

The golden age of documentaries continued in 2010, with filmmakers tackling all sorts of subjects with stylistically innovative approaches. But you had to work hard to keep up with them. Our local independent theaters didn’t book everything. Some played first-run on cable-television’s video-on-demand platform; others on HBO. And thank goodness for our great Public Library system, which seems to buy every documentary available as soon as it’s released on DVD. Here are my 10 favorite docs:

1. Inside Job: Charles Ferguson’s masterful look at the unchecked greed that caused our economy to almost collapse in 2008, and at the close ties between those charged with monitoring Wall Street excess and those getting rich from it. It unfolds like a great thriller, filling you with outrage while at the same time making a complex subject accessible.

2. Exit Through the Gift Shop: Count me among those who believe this Banksy-“directed” look at the world of street art and its cooptation by consumer culture isn’t really a straightforward documentary. But if the movie itself is a prank, it’s a deeply layered, clever one that makes you love it — and art itself — all the more.

3. A Film Unfinished: This disturbing, mournful meditation by Yael Hersonski on the meaning of 60 minutes of forgotten raw footage that the Nazis shot in the Warsaw Ghetto is an important addition to Holocaust studies. It shows the cavalier, inhuman way the Germans tried to exploit as Jewish-caused the horrors of ghetto life — starvation, corpses in the streets, improper sanitation — that their own genocidal policies caused.

4. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child: Director Tamra Davis had interviewed the doomed young artist in the 1980s, right as he was becoming an art star, and uses that footage as a starting point to build this perceptive study of his life. Among her important points is that he wasn’t a naf — he was well-informed on art and culture and smart about his intentions.

5. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work: Directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern treat Rivers with respect, not as the desperate, aging celebrity that pop culture likes to present her as. She rewards them by revealing the tough, sensitive, shrewd, outraged and outrageous comedian-philosopher that she has always been.

6. Casino Jack and the United States of Money: Alex Gibney intricately lays out the way Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, working with the Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay and others (including former Ohio Rep. Bob Ney) put the interests of the country (and, in some cases, Abramoff’s own clients) second to their own financial interests. It’s a strong, penetrating indictment of Republican politics in the George W. Bush era.

7. Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?: In the year’s best music documentary, director John Scheinfeld reminds Boomers (and educates younger viewers) about how gifted a singer-songwriter the late Nilsson was. While he doesn’t shy away from depicting the artist’s self-destructive, substance-abusing side, he also shows that Nilsson never stopped trying to be a productive, caring human being.

8. The Tillman Story: With the cooperation of Pat Tillman’s family, director Amir Bar-Lev methodically unravels the government cover-up about how the football-player-turned Army Ranger was killed in Afghanistan, and the attempt to turn the atheist, intellectual athletic star into a clichéd stereotype of a God-fearing, unquestioning soldier. After the movie, I felt I knew him much better.

9. Gasland: Thanks to HBO for presenting this provocative, artfully made film by Josh Fox about the environmental dangers of a form of natural-gas drilling called “fracking” and the role Vice President Dick Cheney played in making it easier to do. It’s a useful, unexpected addition to the debate on energy policies.

10. The Art of the Steal: Don Argott’s look at the history of Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection of priceless Impressionist art portrays the imperious Dr. Albert Barnes as a rebel against Philadelphia blue-blood society who fought to keep his art out of their greedy hands. I don’t completely buy it — Barnes seems to have confused the collecting art with the making of it in terms of importance — but this is a lively, opinionated slice of American art-collecting and museum history.

Film Review | Exit Through the Gift Shop

Schlock of the New

by Thomas Delapa

Newly arrived on the art-house circuit, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a nearly priceless satire of the contemporary art scene, especially if you’re willing to buy into what may be an elaborate inside joke of the Borat School.

There’s a revolving door of characters in this droll indie documentary, beginning with Thierry Guetta, its gnomishly oddball subject. French-born but in the U.S. since the 1980s, the stubby, mutton-chopped Guetta started his career dabbling as a near-compulsive home videographer. In the 1990s he glommed on to the burgeoning “street art” scene, accompanying and filming outlaw artists in their nighttime tags of Los Angeles. First with his French cousin, a.k.a. “Space Invader,” and Shepard Fairey (later responsible for the iconic Obama “Hope” poster), he worked his up way to the now-famous Banksy, whose subversive, politically-toned British guerilla art elevated him into an underground phenomenon.

In fact, the compulsively secretive Banksy directed Gift Shop, wrapping it up into a wry portrait of Guetta—who may or may not be who he says he is. On a dare, Banksy evidently told Guetta to turn off his camera and take up street art himself. So Thierry mortgaged his house (surprising his wife and family) and reinvented himself as “Mr. Brainwash,” whose style might be described as a kitschy pastiche of Warhol by way of Photoshop.

Whether Guetta is a fraud or post-modern Fauve, idiot or idiot savant, here’s where things get sticky. Leaving his voluminous street art footage behind in the gutter, the film focuses on Guetta’s grandiose, hype-driven efforts to turn himself into another Banksy, perhaps even another Damien Hirst. He exploits a quote from Banksy to launch his enormous 2008 one-man show, “Life is Beautiful,” in L.A. (housed in a converted TV studio where I Love Lucy was shot.) He hires a team of successful designers and promoters, gaining a fawning preview from trendy L.A. Weekly. Despite a broken foot and last-minute chaos stirred up by his own ineptitude, the opening attracts thousands of visitors to see a crammed simulacrum of Warholian soup/spray cans, silk-screened Marilyns and junked TV sets. “I’m not sure why I’m here,” admits one youthful art-goer, “but I’m excited about it.”

When the dust clears, the film’s faintly facetious narrator (actor Rhys Ifans) remarks that over $1 million of Mr. Brainwash’s artwork was sold to the throngs. Earlier this year, Thierry’s 15 minutes of fame was extended well past midnight, triumphing in a best-selling show in New York City.

In our gotcha! era of Borat and Punk’d, unsuspecting spectators can hardly guess what is real and what isn’t anymore, which may allow Banksy to get the last laugh on a gullible, wine-and-cheese-going public. But what may have begun as a prank has morphed into the modern art world’s version of Springtime for Hitler.

The film’s final stroke goes to the seemingly chagrined Banksy (disguised in monkish cowl and electronic voice): “Warhol repeated iconic images until they became meaningless, but there was still something iconic about them. Thierry really makes them meaningless."

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 5/18/10