Peter Gibson is a modest guy in Montreal who didn’t think of himself as an artist when he started spray-painting stencils on the street; he just had inchoate notions about public space and was fueled by a post-9/11 desire to enter what seemed like a new era of discussion — about, seemingly, everything, but never mind; now seemed like the time to get serious. So he took his cardboard stencils out at night, laid them down on the road and spray-painted mischievous additions to Montreal’s roads: turning cross-walks into gigantic shoe-prints or adding zippers to them, even a mysterious “On” button with no obvious function. Non sequiturs were his mode of choice, explicit verbal statements pretty much not on the table. Then he got arrested and was forced to think, seriously, about whether or not he was an artist or just a guy with a weird compulsion.

At any rate, that’s how Alan Kohl’s zippy documentary Roadsworth: Crossing The Line approaches Gibson; it’s one of the most modest artist profiles I’ve seen, and precisely modesty makes it exciting. Gibson doesn’t have a manifesto; he’s against cars, but he’s not sure what he has to add to that conversation. He allows that maybe his work is “raising questions,” but qualifies with “I guess.” He doesn’t think of his stencils as significant: “This is closer to cartoons than it is to high art,” he offers. (Cue the sputtering of 1,000 outraged comix nerds.) He’s not going to tackle heady theoretical questions, because he doesn’t feel intellectually qualified: “I’ve never read Heidegger or, uh, Kant.” This makes Gibson the perfect artist for that genre of SXSW movies we can’t label anymore: bright and funny, but self-consciously hedging around what he’s doing. (As it happens, it sold out its first screening in the underattended, underpromoted SXGlobal section — shunted off to the 70-seat-capacity Hideout — and got an additional screening. So a hit of sorts. SXSW should do much more to promote this slate, which had uniformly stronger selections than any of the other ones I hit up.)

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