Film Forum

On Thursday, September 20 at 8:50, director Manfred Kirchheimer will appear in person for a Q&A following Stations of the Elevated, the first ever graffiti documentary, which weaves images of graffiti covered subway trains with the music of Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin. Graffiti artist David “Chino” Villorente, former graffiti editor for The Source magazine, will also present an illustrated talk on graffiti history. 

Manfred Kirchheimer came to the US in 1936 when his family fled the Nazis in Germany. He studied film at Hans Richter's Institute of Film Techniques of the City College and spent 24 years in the NY film industry as an editor, director, and cameraman, editing over 300 films for the documentary departments of American television networks, with subjects ranging from cultural programming such as Leonard Bernstein in Venice for CBS, to biography for Time-Life Films such as Khrushchev Remembers.

David “CHINO” Villorente is one of the foremost practitioners and ambassadors of graffiti art in the world. His ten-year-reign reign as the editor of both the “Bomb Shelter” and “Graf Flix” graffiti columns in The Source magazine cemented his position as an important arbiter within the graffiti community.  Before that, inside of the years 1983 up through 1988, Vilorente was a prolific graffiti artist known for “applying” his “Chino” moniker onto the interiors of IND and BMT subway trains governed by New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Vilorente’s written work has appeared in magazines such as Complex, Mass Appeal, and YRB, while his firsthand knowledge of the graffiti movement and all its past, present and future players makes him an indispensable source for dozens of other publications. He is the co-author of Piecebook, Piecebook Reloaded, World Piecebook (all Prestel publishing), Mascots & Mugs: The Characters and Cartoons of Subway Graffiti, and is the co-curator of Write of Passage, a graffiti and street art exhibit at Redbull Studios. Villorente currently resides in his native borough, Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

“The accidental magic of reflections and shadows meshes with the pure forms of architecture and the overlooked artistry of advertisements to conjure a feeling of unrelenting sensory adventure.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“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 Village Voice

“Stations of the Elevated is about how beauty is discovered and made in unpromising circumstances.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“The Classic Graffiti Doc You Need to See.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone

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