Stations of the Elevated

My review was written in October 1981 following a New York Film Festival screening.

"Stations of the Elevated" is a repetitious, overlong abstract documentary mainly concerned with ugly shots of graffiti-painted New York City subway trains and tableaux of billboards set against natural backdrops. One-man filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer seems obsessed by "found" vistas approximating pop art, but his tedious, cryptic film fails to arouse much interest in the un-stoned spectator. Pic was backed by the American Film Institute and National Endowment for the Arts coin.

In terms of sheer abstraction, film is a bloated, vastly inferior followup to a beautiful black & white short made in the mid-70s by Carroll Ballard and Caleb Deschanel and others of the Francis Coppola clan entitled "Trains" and released by United Artists as a program support. Late in the pic Kirchheimer turns from the abstract to attempted social commentary, with banal juxtapositions of ghetto kids and deteriorating neighborhoods with the "Hate" and death imagery painted on the subway cars traveling along elevated tracks.

BIggest defect of this exercise is misuse of the music of the late jazz bassist Charles Mingus. His recordings, such as "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" and "Haitian Fight Song" of two decades ago creep in on the soundtrack to provide the film's only dynamism, as visuals are either static or distant telephoto tracking shots of the trains. But just as the Mingus band gets warmed up and really starts cooking, Kirchheimer replaces the music with screeching train noises. He should be ashamed.