I was told before I even set foot in Park City that Sundance always saves one movie as a secret. On the program, they call it the “Spotlight Surprise.” This year, it was a documentary film by the street artist Banksy, called “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Reports of Banksy graffiti around Park City floated around. When I spotted my first Banksy on an errant wall off Main Street, I snapped a photo like everyone else. But I felt jaded. After all, how different was this from those Hollywood “guerrilla marketing” campaigns?

Sundance is fun because there aren’t any publicity campaigns telling you what to do, there aren’t critics telling you what to think. You go and you watch. If you don’t like it, you can leave. (And people do.) So I didn’t know what to expect with the Banksy film, but the hype surrounding him in recent years made me skeptical. Hadn’t he sold out?

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about a French man living in Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta. He owns a thrift store, has massive sideburns and a paunch, and is obsessed with documenting his life with a video camera. There is no explanation for what he films. There are shots of the toilet being flushed, of him taking a bath with his children. His wife, exasperated, accepts it. His friends learn to ignore the camera. It’s not until Guetta starts filming his cousin, the street artist named Space Invader, that he finds his calling.

Guetta starts telling people he is making a documentary about street art. And through his cousin’s network, he gets access to all kinds of street artists, each with names more awesome than the next: Monsier Andre, Zeus, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Neckface, Dotmasters, Borf, Buffmonster. These artists agree to let themselves be filmed, despite the fact that what they do is illegal. “Street art has a short life span,” Banksy says at one point. “It needed to be documented. It needed someone who could use a camera.” (Btw–forget any chance of learning Banksy’s identity. He appears in a dark corner, with a black hoodie obscuring his face; his voice is modified.) One of the best things about the movie is the amazing footage Guetta logged: a breathtaking shot of an artist wheat-pasting in the middle of the night from the top of an enormous building; a slap-stick moment of Shepard Fairey on a ladder, pasting up an Obey poster in front of a couple of oblivious cops in broad daylight. It’s funny, daring, and beautiful to watch.

Only one street artist eludes Guetta: Banksy. And Guetta loves Banksy. Like, really, really, really loves him: “He was–He is–He was,” Guetta gushes at one point. “I really like him.” He will do anything to meet Banksy, anything to have the opportunity to film him doing his work.

How Guetta meets Banksy, and how Guetta leverages his connection to Banksy into an enormous art show in downtown Los Angeles with a Warhol-like factory employing dozens of minions, raking in over a million dollars–well, I’ll leave that to the film to explain.

But I will say this: I don’t think Banksy sold out. The film, in a brilliant way, salvages his reputation. Banksy, in casually taking us step by step through Guetta’s journey, slowly pulls the focus of the camera away from himself and onto Guetta and the art world. And Guetta, in emulating Banksy and cashing in on the street art craze, ultimately embodies everything that is rotten about the art industry.

As Nigel says in Spinal Tap, “This one goes to eleven.”

Last Thursday, fresh off my flight, I snagged a hot ticket to see the premiere of Shorts Program 1, on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. The line-up featured four films: “I’m Here” by Spike Jonze; “The Fence” by Rory Kennedy; “Logorama” by Francoise Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, Ludovic Houplain (H5); and “Seeds of the Fall” by Patrik Eklund.

The Egyptian Theatre, with its Art Deco vibe, and old-fashioned seats, is a reminder of what the typical movie experience used to be. The crowd was chatty, and as I sat there, waiting for the premiere to begin (most screenings at Sundance, I learned, don’t start on time, but you still have to get there early), I could hear industry insiders catching up with one another. (The woman behind mentioned her lunch with Michael Moore three times: “He said some really interesting things, things I can’t repeat here.”) Either way, everyone seemed quite pleased that their screening was special enough for Robert Redford to take the stage before its start. He’s quite charming in that all-American way, with his cowboy boots, tousled hair and perfect posture. Here’s what he said to us:

I want to say, this is an opening tonight, the Shorts Program. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that. And there are a lot of things we’re doing differently this year. One of the things we wanted to do, tying to the diversity of Sundance and the fact that we have different types of films–rather than putting all the eggs in one basket—’OK, we’re going to have a grand opening at the Eccles Theatre’–we’re going to have multiple openings featuring the different parts of Sundance that we hold with equal importance. And Shorts is that: equally important. So we’re really happy to have this screening tonight as an opening. I just wanted you to know that.

On the idea of shorts: Over the years Sundance has been committed to forging new ground in film. We started with documentaries in the late eighties on the assumption that documentaries would and should reach the level of narrative films, and find a marketplace.

When we select, we ask people to send tapes and they usually send shorts. So we look at these shorts to evaluate the filmmakers and see if they can come to Sundance. Well, looking at those shorts–it’s very, very impacting, because they are all stories–and it occurred to me a long time ago that this category should be encased and put into a kind of program. That someday there would be a future in the marketplace for them. So we were doing a lot of that for a lot of years and now with the advance in the new technologies and the shortening attention span, now there is a distribution marketplace for shorts. And I think the shorts programs are going to play a greater and greater role.

I think it’s interesting that Redford said this (the bold is mine), in part because YouTube was a big sponsor for the festival this year, but also because I think he’s right. The Internet may have caused a lot of trouble for the movie industry, but I think it is also the perfect home for short films.

I caught a bit of Robert Redford on my Flip camera, too:

Robert Redford at Sundance from Thessaly La Force on Vimeo.

We got see a couple matches at the U.S. Open on Monday, thanks to Fred’s cousin. (Oudin vs. Petrova; Federer vs. Robredo; Verdasco vs. Isner.) I objected to Oudin’s enthusiastic fist jabs (People tell me, ‘Come on! She’s 17!’ Still.) , and Richard Brody sent me this video clip. Godard understood what was up. Or maybe he just didn’t like the modern tennis racquet.