Style Wars
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B-
When a documentary is done correctly, it can appreciate in
value, especially when it deals with the arts.
Style Wars (1983) is a great example, as it documents the rise of
Hip Hop and the conclusion of the graffiti mania that plastered New York subway
cars over and over again. Director Tony
Silver had one of the earliest victories at The Sundance Film Festival with
this 70 minutes-long look at New York and the many diverse lives living in it.
Though many site the fictional film Wild Style
(1982) as a document of how the rising Hip Hop scene was at the time, that
picture has its limits. In contrast, Style
Wars found its way onto PBS stations nationally and is a painstakingly
constructed work that touches on every single figure in what turned out to be a
major movement in the making beyond the highest expectations of any of its
participants.
This was the first explicit look at the budding culture to
be, at a time when the 1970s was about to be supplanted by the Reagan era. It shows how so many extremely talented
artists land up in conflict with both authority (parents to police and
politicians), as well as each other.
These same artists have an irrepressible need to create, along with the
extraordinary energy that goes with it.
This is also manifest in the harder-core version of the Disco-era party
music that is on the rise, Rap. It can
be seen in breakdancing and the competitions that turned up turning out
international competition!
We also see a time of innocence and of the last gasps of
hope in the working class communities before the collapse of the industrial
age, and the rise of the communications era, forever transforming the position
of the working class and poor in the United States. It is an era before AIDS, SARS, and especially with the shots of
New York that just never cease to amaze, terrorism at home. That the worst possible problems we see in
this film can be truly seen as “the good old days” has a darkly ironic overtone
impossible for those who could not even see Hip Hop coming, let alone the
events of 9-11!
The thing that makes Silver’s film (co-produced with Henry
Chalfant) hold up the most is insight and the focus on people. Hearing what they have to honestly say, and seeing
how they feel, is priceless. It is the
moral center of the work. It is a
triumph to see these people so open, with no ego (even those who have some are
not so totally egotistical as to be unreadable), no pretension, the reality
that “reality TV” and over-mediation of the media has murdered.
It helps additionally that the work was shot on film. The 16mm stocks have held up extraordinarily
well. The grain shows the productions
age, but the clarity and color quality in the mostly full-color film are
great. That is especially good news for
those artists who offered color-rich graffiti.
The full-screen image on the DVD is impressive, though there is some
shimmering towards the end that indicate that the tape source was slightly
distorted in the transfer process.
Otherwise, it is just another argument for how great documentaries can
look, as well as how very far High Definition digital video has to before
reaching this quality.
The sound may even be more extraordinary. The original monophonic sound has been
remarkably remixed for Dolby Digital AC-3 5.1 sound, easily outdoing the same
thing on the Wild Style DVD, which had shrillness and muddy bass
problems. Here, it seems like the
filmmakers and Plexifilm got their hands on high-quality (maybe even master
tapes) of the various music featured in the original film and came up with a
remix that will make one think more of the incredible 5.1 on the recent Scratch
set. The spoken dialogue is not too
stuck in the center speaker either, which is a big plus, since this tends to be
a major problem and mistake in such remixes.
The disc set is also loaded with extras that simply turn
the film into an encyclopedia of early Hip Hop and New York graffiti. Disc One has a commentary track by Silver
and Chalfant, plus an on-camera interview by them, about 24 minutes of
interesting outtakes from the film, and an interview with Victor Kanefsky and
Sam Pollard, the film’s clever editors.
Disc Two had tributes to those who have passed on already,
guest interviews, interviews with every artist in the film twenty years later,
and an intensely extensive gallery of just about every train that was ever
“tagged”. This second disc is the
epitome of how to expand extras around a main program and is extremely
archival.
With all this, the Style Wars set is a must-have
for fans and a perfect match for the Scratch set Palm Pictures recently
issued. Any music library serious about
this music must contain both, not to mention the art and art of documentary
filmmaking this set is all about.
- Nicholas Sheffo
