Directors: David Sauriol-Joly and Nicolas Sauriol-Joly
Cast: Hendrik ECB Beikirch, Kool Kito, Gurs
Running time: 1hr 23mins
Graffiti is not my thing, for reasons which may become clear over the course of this review. That is not the case for Canadian siblings, David Sauriol-Joly and Nicolas Sauriol-Joly, the co-directors of the feature length documentary Open Streets, however, as they are evidently in love with the art form.
Open Streets is a monumental piece of work on those terms – an assemblage of archive footage trawled from a vast number of sources stretching back to the 1970s, spanning cityscapes in New York, Montreal, the Netherlands, and Paris. There are copious interviews with practitioners, and footage filmed live as several of the artists – who are exclusively male – go about their work.
A couple of explanatory notes for readers who like your reviewer might be unfamiliar with the medium sometimes (but not exclusively) referred to as graffiti. At other times, it is also knwon as street art – and the genre appears to have a taxonomy where three distinct forms can be identified.
Tagging where the object is for the artist to establish a brand by inundating their immediate environment with stylised renditions of their working brand name. As Kool Kito, one of the artists, remarks – you don’t know my face, but you know my name.
Second, there is street art that uses narrative to achieve a celebratory effect and/or to beautify the neighbourhood. I came across a beautiful example of this form last year in Naples – a mural of the footballer Diego Maradona as a winged angel in the clouds handing down the scudetto trophy to the grateful populace.
Finally, there is the form that aims to subvert by producing a narrative that persuades the viewer to question existing power relationships within society. An outstanding example of this form is the celebrated work by the UK artist, Banksy, of a young child holding a balloon set against the concrete vastness of the Israeli apartheid wall.
These three forms are generally distinct, but can quite commonly also overlap, and meld into each other.
In exploring these forms of graffiti, the directors take an approach to the documentary format that I particularly enjoy – they let their subjects speak for themselves without the use of an omniscient narrator telling the audience what to think. A nice touch giving a feeling of a sense of a community project was, as part of the end credits, we were given a short biography of the featured artists and what they were up to at the completion of the movie.
The Sauriol-Jolys are film-study graduates who both have extensive experience working in film and television. They use their experience to great effect – Open Streets looks stunning. Some of the cinematography is sublime.
This is underscored by some truly exceptional editing, too. This is best demonstrated in the last quarter of the movie which concentrates on street artists at work. The key sequence takes place at night and the footage is filmed by a hand-held camera or I-Phone. We follow a particular artist as they clamber up fire escapes and across rooftops – edited into the footage are shots of a digital clock face – which gives the viewer a dramatic sense of real time unfolding. Police sirens erupt and the audience senses the danger that the artist and film crew have put themselves in. The scene is so well realised – it felt like I was watching a classic noir thriller.
However, the mood of Open Streets is relentlessly heroic – we are being invited to admire the artists and think of them as worthy of emulation. Here things fall a little short, as the heroic stance seems to preclude any examination of the artists’ political situation. The omission is a pity as street art sits at the centre of the trifecta of the means by which the state can be said to control its subject population. The means of production. The means of persuasion. The means of coercion.
For example, one segment sees artists working on gigantic murals in the celebratory/beautification form. One of the artists is painting perched on a hydraulic platform. (As an aside, look out for the work by Hendrik ECB Beikirch – they are stunning portrayals of everyday people, one of which covers the entire side wall of a high rise apartment block.) With these artists and their colleagues working in the subversive form, the filmmakers take us to the artists’ workshops and lock ups which seem to hold a cornucopia of paints and arts materials. Your reviewer dabbles in painting in watercolour and gouache, so knows the price of paint – and these people are deploying thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of euros worth of paint and kit. The thought in this case occurs – are these featured individuals just middle-class hobbyists, commercial artists, or heroic subversive radicals? Have they been co-opted by the state’s twin arms of local government and big business, the means of persuasion and the means of production? Unfortunately, after watching Open Streets I am none the wiser.
Challenging this possible means of coercion, one scene in particular stood out for me. The filmmakers follow with hand-held camera a local artist, Gurs, on the Paris Metro undertaking a tagging expedition. Gurs, wearing shades and impeccable street clothing, is the epitome of fine street style – a contemporary boulevardier. As Gurs makes his way along the crowded platforms and escalators, he proceeds to tag his moniker on walls and signage. The aim of the Sauriol-Jolys here is to make the audience complicit in Gurs’ breaking of the law, by our following his tagging and for us to admire his daring do. On the other hand, one might also argue that degrading the local public transport infrastructure on which poor people depend for their mobility is hardly a progressive or revolutionary act.
Additionally, there are two other sections involving different artists which, given the movie’s heroic aspirations, really should not have made the cut.
One artist tells us that after he discovered that his partner, who we are driven to assume is a woman, had cheated on him – he went out and sprayed the word TRUST all across the local neighbourhood. Another recalls a break-up with the mother of his young daughter, who subsequently obtained custody of the child. In response, the artist produced a series of ornate portraits of his daughter on walls which she would pass on her way from her home to her school. Here we are being asked to admire the art and not to think about what effect the images would have had on the child and the mother. In both cases, rather than applaud the subversive innovation and style of the artists, I would guess most IFL viewers would be repulsed by the, in effect, controlling and emotionally abusive behaviour aimed at women from men.
Again, it does not help that all the featured artists are men. Looking at the film’s credits, the entire production appears to be male, while the only woman featured as a talking head is the mother of a young street artist who fell a hundred feet from a building, and miraculously survived with minor injuries. This utter focus on men in the medium, coupled with the occasionally disciplinarian tone, means that at times, I felt like I was watching a production from the Taliban social media centre.
The artists’ biographies in the end credits only serve to underwrite the previously stated concerns here. First, they contain many references to individuals reaching the apogee of their careers by stating they work all over the world. Well bully for them…
In contrast, we learn that one, presumably less successful, artist lives with his wife in New Jersey. In keeping with the ethos of the movie – the woman is unnamed. The entry reminded me of the title of a famous picture by the reactionary East Anglian painter and President of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings (the man who tried to prosecute Stanley Spencer for obscenity). The title reads – My Wife, My Horse and Myself.
As a postscript, I must thank the directors for their inclusion of one memorable image that resonated and will stay with me. They found in the archive’s news footage of a fire at an apartment block. Covering the top half of the building is a vibrant vividly coloured piece of street art. As the fire takes hold, the mural collapses into the street below. A case of life, the viewer is after all alive, outlasting the artefact. Overall, this is indicative of how the Sauriol-Jolys have given us, in many ways, a fine work with truly great production values; successfully showing off the great wealth of material in their archives. I am sure the film will be a must see for street art fans, and will be a valuable archive resource for the future to that end.
However, Open Streets remains a hard movie to rate. For the reasons outlined above, I would think many IFL viewers would also find aspects of the film so rebarbative they might not make it through to the end. I hope the Sauriol-Jolys continue their work, but I would be more interested to see a future submission that involved the other half of humanity omitted from Open Streets.