Out of interest and practice I am going to share things I watch, listen to, and read. Could be a line or two or more. Unstructured, no pressure or deadline. Perhaps it will inspire a longer reflection. But it seems more constructive for my creative outlet and my mental & spiritual health at large.
Stations of the Elevated by Manfred Kirchheimer
Manfred Kirchheimer sequences the zeitgeist of a New York (city) and her outskirts nearing the end of the 60s. A nostalgic jaunt through film, soundscapes, and music. Dubbed with a symphony scored by train tracks, cars, screeching rails and jazz. It discusses all this in a dialogue with the graffiti and billboards that are visual protagonists during the first half of the film. They peek into the viewers soul and demonstrate their power. Hovering over the train carts and their eclectic passengers, the film deploys camera shots to speculate the shunt through the angular scaffolds and elevated tracks, winding between sky scrapers, perplexed amongst foliage, or stammered by the omens of the factories that watch them pass by. Manfred uses all this to console the viewer, spurring a desire for city tramping. But it also engenders a nausea as it depicts the social, political, and economic visuals of the nascent deterioration of the façade of a healthy, prosperous and dream granting nation.
Shots of trees and peripheries, juxtaposed with the cityscapes behind the tracks drive the score into a higher plane than just simple urban noise and pollution dossier. Oddly settling and soothing at times, perturbing in others (specifically around minute 18 the camera stills on a corner apartment that looks gutted by fire, the train goes by reflecting in a stranded shard holding strong and faithful in the window’s pane). The sounds, the speed of the train, and the heinous proximity between the train tracks and building, once and possibly still shelter from the elements for human life, delivers a message with strong visual and audible testimony.
The film is not all cityscape, Charles Mingus, and graffiti appreciation. But it's important to note that the montage of images and sounds allow Mingus to transcend his blatant wink to public transport and NYC love in “Take the ‘A’ Train”. He collaborates with Kirchheimer, synthesizing a visual and audible exegesis on urban U.S. American society.
These visuals do depend on the graffiti tags on train cars that exclaim both city misery and glory.The eschatological yelps of "earth is hell", "shadow pushers", etc. and the “creationist aphorisms” (DiTrolio, Stephen) like "Heaven is Life".
Throughout Kirchhheimer’s film, the cacophony of screeching metal with breaks of Aretha Franklin’s voice and the strolling Mingus bassline, the ruin in the graffitis may outweigh the worship of the urban predicament. The last 20 minutes or so, segments ping pong between advertisements, projects in the South Bronx, pastoral countryside coexisting with a prison, factories, and the slithering ubiquitous Lexington Ave Express. Never has a prison appeared so profanely quaint.The shots of sentinel smoke stacks that puff out smoke, personify the the US American Industrial atrophy. Without shifting much in style and frame duration, the film builds its energy as the critique becomes ever more visual and audible all the while pressing deeper, below the two-dimensional billboard grins and olive skin tones that dominated the first half. Waving grass in the foreground brushes the landing planes behind it, and the boldest perceptible critique takes to task the superfluous militarization of Empire. Stripped of its securities and power-fear mongering, it is epitomized by a shot of a junk yard being held guard by a 1960s tank that is dilapidated, defenseless, and eye-carrion.
As Aretha belts out contrast and real talk, she graciously crossfades into Mingus and a jazz band accompanying the sundown. They both bring the film just short of full circle- the trains diurnal shift ending- preparing for their near phantasmal nocturnal run.
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