Stations Of The Elevated Music Licensed, New Screenings, Mingus Dynasty Performs

STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival, but lacking appropriate music licenses, was never theatrically released in the United States. In the 30 years since its completion it has been rarely screened, developing a cult amongst cinephiles and jazz and graffiti lovers. After two years of working to secure appropriate licenses for its soundtrack, APD’s Cinema Conservancy program will finally make this crucial cultural document and cinematic experience available to the public in 2014 with a theatrical run. 

Preceeding the theatrical run, APD/Cinema Conservancy’s new restoration of STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED will premiere on Friday, June 27 as part of BAMcinemaFest on the Steinberg Screen at the BAM Harvey Theater. The event begins with a live performance by legendary jazz ensemble the Mingus Dynasty, the original Charles Mingus legacy band. The first band Sue Mingus organized after Charles’ death in 1979, this acclaimed orchestra continues to interpret Charles Mingus’ more than 300 compositions, and will perform as a prelude to Kirchheimer’s jazz-inflected documentary. For more info at the film’s BAM premiere, click here.

STATIONS is a 45-minute city symphony directed, produced and edited by Manfred Kirchheimer. Shot on lush 16mm color reversal stock, the film weaves together vivid images of graffiti-covered elevated subway trains crisscrossing the gritty urban landscape of 1970s New York, to a commentary-free soundtrack that combines ambient city noise with jazz and gospel by Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin. Gliding through the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan – making a rural detour past a correctional facility upstate – STATIONS is an impressionistic portrait of and tribute to a New York that has long since disappeared.

The first-ever documentations of graffiti on film, STATIONS captures the height of the 1970s graffiti movement in New York, featuring the work of early legends including Lee, Fab 5 Freddy, Shadow, Daze, Kase, Butch, Blade, Slave, 12 T2B, Ree, and Pusher. Juxtaposing the colorful imagery of ‘tagged’ cars with shots of carefully hand-painted billboards depicting hamburgers and bikini-clad women, STATIONS forces audiences to ask: “What is urban art, and what role does it play in the daily life of a city?”