Stations of the elevated

United States, 1980

Film
Please note

Sorry, we don't have images or video for this item.

Source: Some information on this page may have been sourced as part of the 2023 Wikimedia Australia Partnership Projects grant, with the purpose of improving and expanding the use of Wikidata on our website. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Read more about this project here.

Beginning in the switching yards as they set out on their daily route, Kirchheimer has photographed New Yorks trains as works of art and canvases for the city’s graffiti. As they travel through the decaying urban landscape, they are juxtaposed with advertisements which the filmmaker calls ‘sanctioned vandalism’. Eloquently combines glimpses of faces, billboards and 20th Century artefacts with an urban jazz soundtrack, by Charles Mingus, to create a political film exploring the possibilities of cinema and the visual texture of urban life.

Content notification

Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.

Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.

Please note: this archive is an ongoing body of work. Sometimes the credit information (director, year etc) isn’t available so these fields may be left blank; we are progressively filling these in with further research.

Cite this work on Wikipedia

If you would like to cite this item, please use the following template: {{cite web |url=https://acmi.net.au/works/77392--stations-of-the-elevated/ |title=Stations of the elevated |author=Australian Centre for the Moving Image |access-date=15 October 2024 |publisher=Australian Centre for the Moving Image}}