Film

The earliest filmed document of graffiti, Manfred Kirchheimer’s richly chromatic 16mm city symphony sets images of northern Manhattan to a soundtrack that interweaves ambient city noises with the gutbucket gospel squall of jazz titan Charles Mingus. Long regarded by cinephiles and hip-hop heads as an obscure cult masterpiece since it premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival, Stations of the Elevated is a celebration of a quintessentially urban art form—at a time when it was largely dismissed as vandalism. This priceless portrait of a bygone era is preceded by Kirchheimer’s short film Claw, a poetic, deeply critical examination of urban renewal.