Thursday, October 16, 2014

Films that we want to see: 'Stations of the Elevated'



"Stations of the Elevated" opens tomorrow for a week-long run out at BAM. We'd like to see it.

Some thoughts in the press:

Manfred Kirchheimer's Stations of the Elevated (1981) is a 45-minute proto-hip-hop bliss-out, a masterpiece of train- and tag-spotting dedicated to memorializing the extravagant graffiti on its era's MTA trains and how those trains rumbled across Brooklyn and the Bronx, bearing not just exhausted New Yorkers but gifted artists' urgent personal expression.
(Alan Scherstuhl, the Voice)

Graffiti no longer represents the menace it did in the seventies and eighties. It’s arguable whether most New Yorkers even find it offensive anymore. It is part of the romantic, rough-and-tumble past, preserved in museums and coffee-table books. You are just as likely to see graffiti on the streets of Brooklyn as on the Web site announcing a new Brooklyn condo, an evocative signifier of urban bona fides. Graffiti quietly anticipated the look and feel of contemporary advertising, from guerrilla marketing to the notion that every surface was a potential billboard.
(Hua Hsu, The New Yorker)
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2 comments:

  1. RichardOctober 17, 2014 at 1:11 AM

    I want to see this film just because of the title. Honestly, that might be the single best film title I've ever heard.

    ReplyDelete
  2. WalterOctober 17, 2014 at 1:32 AM

    Those trains had some of the most extraordinary art work I've ever laid eyes on. And NOBODY would ever tag one of those cars. There was a lot of mutual respect. But that was the 70s...glad I remember parts of that era.

    ReplyDelete

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