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.

This 1979 documentary is one of my all time favorites. The structure is as simple as they come. Footage of the various New York subways which run on elevated tracks is set to the music of Charles Mingus (with a little Duke Ellington thrown in for good measure)

It's as if you are riding the rails in 79' while listening to Mingus on your walk man. Eye candy up the wazzoo from graffiti to Nylon paisley shirts but there are no characters per say; except for the subways themselves.

This is not a movie - there is no narrative. It is the essence of what makes new york new york - the movement, the metal, the concrete, the gritty. It is an expression of the idea that the city is never at one time motionless, that all people and things are moving, living, and ticking like gears. The jazz music is a reminder of the city's irregular rhythm, it's unique pulse. Like a nature film, this documentary focuses on slithering trains through a concrete jungle, using angles a kin to nat geo cameramen in the bush. You sit, watching the city go by, wondering if it all there is some meaning to the lifecycle within the city's ever-moving populous

Set in NYC with background music from Charles Mingus in place of dialog, this film gives us a look several dozen graffiti-laden subway cars.

The graffiti are eye-catching enough, but across the span of the film we come back to the same cars again and again. The repetition seems purposeful, since plenty of other cars were available for shooting if the filmmaker had wanted. But if the repetition was meant to carry a message or effect, it was lost on me.

The images of subway cars are juxtaposed with other images from the same environment--billboards, notably--and here the effect is to show how the train graffiti compare to their everyday context.

Some of the most memorable images are shadows of standers-by, which are shot from unusual angles. These add yet another intriguing visual component. Watching the barely-moving gray shadows of humans, shot from uncommon vantage points, as we look straight on at the colorful trains passing by underlines the fact that the graffiti-laden trains are the focus of the film.

This beautifully filmed homage to the details & infrastructure of NYC in the decay of the late 1970's set to the music of Charles Mingus & capped with Aretha is the most moving and delicate of films. It is 45 minutes you will not regret.