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Next: A Primer on Urban Painting review
:. Director: Pablo Aravena
:. Genre: Documentary
:. Running Time: 1:35
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: Canada, France
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In Next: A Primer on Urban Painting, filmmaker Pablo Aravena documents graffiti art around the world, from the gritty streets of New York to the dark catacombs of Paris, meeting with various artists and showcasing the pieces that cover the walls of modern cities.
We learn that urban painting was born in New York's disenfranchised neighborhoods and that partly, thanks to trains covered with graffiti's traversing borders, it quickly spread to the walls of the rest of the world. Aravena took his camera to several metropolises including Barcelona, Tokyo, Sao Paulo & London.
The journey is visually exciting and we clearly see that graffiti painting is a full-fleshed art, despite its negative guerilla-type connotation. While these painters acknowledge the talent of their peers, it is also obvious that they are all engaged in some egocentric competition where they try to outdo each other by painting their pieces on top of each other's — it is actually pretty amusing to find logos from local talent Shepard Farley (Obey) and Banksy in all these cities.
What's less enticing is that by trying to outdo each other, erasing and covering each other's layers on these walls not only art destroys art, but these pieces exist a very short time, sometimes lasting only a few hours.
And this is also where the weakness of this documentary lies, as Aravena chooses the role of the witness to tell his story, never using his camera to give an opinion about what he's showing us. As a French native and fan of the Paris catacombs, I was also quite disturbed seeing these artists painting over historical walls even though I must admit some of the graffiti — and accompanying sculptures — looked pretty good in such a setting. Aravena should have questioned the consequences on spraying on another valuable monument, but he also should have clearly shown the difference between real and bad artists, which isn't hard to see, without forgetting to mention the use of graffiti as a gang logo .
Regrettably, he didn't interview prominent figures such as Farley or the more secret Banksy. An appealing film worth watching, Next looks like a fan's labor of love, but we should definitely expect more from a documentary filmmaker.
Fred Thom
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