Stations of the Elevated: Graffiti’s golden age

The documentary Stations of the Elevated shows the birth of New York’s graffiti movement. Tom Brook interviews the man who helped raise vandalism to an artform.

When it premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival, the film Stations of the Elevated celebrated the graffiti that covered the city’s subway trains but which was then dismissed as mere vandalism. Yet the man who created it believes that is the wrong label.

“They were kids who were actually expressing themselves and who were expressing themselves out of a ghetto,” says Manny Kirchheimer, who is now 83. “It made me think about legality and illegality.”

Inspired to make the film after seeing trains covered in graffiti above a highway at dawn – “these glittering bouquets of colour” – Kirchheimer set his images to a soundtrack of ambient urban noises and jazz. “It’s often raucous. It’s often angry. It’s often very tender, and it seemed just right.”

Stations of the Elevated has just been restored and is returning to the big screen. Kirchheimer tells Tom Brook about how he chose to tell a story that’s been described as a “city symphony”.

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