Style Wars, by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant
Within the programming of
The Magnetic Terrace 2023: ¡Alucina, vecina!
A legendary documentary about the golden age of graffiti and the importance of hip-hop culture in the US after it burst on to the New York scene at the beginning of the 1980s. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984.
| Target audience: | General public |
| Location: | Deck |
| Duration: | 1 hour 15 minutes |
| Price: | 4€ |
Style Wars, by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. US, 1983. 69 min.
In Style Wars, the ramshackle New York subway is the playground, battle field and mobile artistic canvas for graffiti writers. Opposing them are the mayor Edward Koch, the police and the New York Transit Authority. Meanwhile, MCs, DJs and B-boys rock the city with new sounds and new moves, and street-corner breakdance battles evolve into performance art. The sound track includes classics performed by The Sugarhill Gang, The Treacherous Three, The Fearless Four, Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five, Trouble Funk, Rammellzee/K-Rob and Dion.
Tony Silver (New York, 1935) attended Columbia University and had a short career as an actor before becoming the leading independent maker of film trailers on the east coast of the US. In 1970, still busy with his award-winning trailers, special effects and advertisements, he started making his own films. In 1984 Style Wars won the Grand Jury Prize at the precursor to the Sundance Film Festival.
Henry Chalfant started out as a sculptor but abandoned the medium after witnessing the explosion of graffiti in New York in the mid-1970s. His photographs of hundreds of ephemeral art works, now long vanished, made him one of the foremost authorities on the graffiti culture of the New York subway. He co-authored the books Subway art with Martha Cooper and Spraycan Art with James Prigoff. He also co-directed with Rita Fecher a documentary on South Bronx gangs, Flyin' Cut Sleeves (1994), and he directed From Mambo to Hip-Hop (2006).
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