“This is the first film of its kind that captured a beautiful golden age where a lot of these cars were being painted, and that urgency,” he says. “He was able to capture that, and way before the established art world even got a pulse that this was going on underneath their feet.”
Kirchheimer is not the guy you would expect to make a movie about graffiti. He was born in Germany and fled to New York with his parents in 1936. He was in his late 40s when he shot Stations of the Elevated in 1977. He didn’t know anyone who wrote graffiti, and he’d never given it much thought.
“As a matter of fact, there was a great deal of graffiti around that I didn’t pay much attention to,” Kirchheimer says.
Then he found himself driving up to the Bronx early in the morning, and he saw the trains running overhead.
“They would come by and it would be screaming full of colors — just gorgeous,” he says. “The smart thing I did was shoot it all outdoors. Most of the lines are indoors, and the way most people see these paintings was indoors. Doing it outdoors gave a whole other perspective.”
It was a grittier time in New York’s history, when the city could barely afford to clean subway cars, inside or out. Most straphangers considered graffiti writers a nuisance, or worse. But Kirchheimer was focused on “elevating” their work, as the title of the film suggests.
“The genre, if there is one, is one that goes back to the beginning of cinema. That’s the city symphony,” says Jake Perlin, who is reissuing Stations of the Elevated through his company, Artists Public Domain.
He says Kirchheimer also asked a profound moral question: “How does this artwork that was deemed illegal coexist in a city with advertising that is deemed legal [and] that is possibly more offensive?”
Stations of the Elevated contrasts the painted subway cars with outdoor advertising on billboards — giant images of cigarettes, alcohol and semi-nude women. Artist Quinones says the film captures something essential about a moment in the history of the graffiti movement, and of New York City, which is long gone.
“There’s something really magical about when you see a train coming around a curve with a beautiful painting on it, and that painting is moving in more ways than that train is actually moving,” Quinones says. “It’s in and out, all over the place. And it’s mind-boggling. And that film captures that. It’s something majestic that I can’t even explain completely.”
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