ABOUT

“The Holy Grail of hip-hop movies.”

In 1983, just a decade after DJ Kool Herc’s historic “Back-to-School Jam” in a South Bronx apartment building, PBS aired Tony Silver’s groundbreaking document of the burgeoning hip-hop movement. A lively and richly observant account of the thriving culture of graffiti writers who were making their mark on the early-’80s New York cityscape.

BLU-RAY HISTORY

Style Wars on Blu Ray

“About 10 years ago, Tony Silver and I set out to digitize Style Wars in High Definition. For best results you must go back to the first generation, and make the transfer from the original edited negative. To our great disappointment, we discovered that the negative had been badly damaged by moisture during the two decades it had been in storage. We were told that once we made the transfer, we could restore the film digitally, frame by frame, but that the cost would be astronomical.

Sadly, we we put the idea on the shelf. Tony died before realizing this dream. In the years since, His widow, Lisa Citron, and I were able to raise the money for the film’s restoration, almost entirely through fan-based donations. Catherine Keener recruited celebrities from the world of film to contribute artworks they had made for a fundraising auction; a successful Kickstarter campaign raised enough money to produce the outtakes.

Through more good fortune, we engaged Chris Woods who did the digital restoration without hurting the beautiful sensual quality of the original film; Gerry Gershman shepherded us through the process of acquiring all the music rights; Philippe Deneree selected the best outtakes and edited them into an exciting new document; Victor Kanefsky contributed the footage of a film bring shot at his studio, Valkhn Films, in 1983 while he and Sam Pollard were editing Style Wars. Victor and Philippe have put together that footage to make a 21 minute film about the editing of Style Wars.

Lisa and I are very grateful to the Public Art Films board members, Carlos, Raquel, Sacha and Brian, for the bottomless well of their support for this project. Style Wars, the BluRay, is dedicated to the loving memory of Tony Silver, Burleigh Wartes, Jim Szalapski, Kippy Dee, Dondi, Shy 147, Kase 2, Rammellzee, and Iz the Wiz.”

-Henry Chalfant, January 2015.

THE DOCUMENTARY

The Original Style Wars

Directed by Tony Silver and produced by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, it was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentaries at the 1983 Sundance Film Festival. STYLE WARS is regarded as the indispensable document of New York Street culture of the early ’80s, the filmic record of a golden age of youthful creativity that exploded into the world from a city in crisis.

STYLE WARS captured the look and feel of New York’s ramshackle subway system as graffiti writers’ public playground, battleground and spectacular artistic canvas. Opposing them by every means possible were Mayor Edward Koch, the police, and the New York Transit Authority. Meanwhile MCs, DJs and B-boys rocked the city with new sounds and new moves and street corner breakdance battles evolved into performance art.

New York’s legendary kings of graffiti and b-boys own a special place in the hip hop pantheon. STYLE WARS has become an emblem of the original, embracing spirit of hip hop as it reached out across the world from underground tunnels, uptown streets, clubs and playgrounds.

THE FILMMAKERS

Tony Silver – Director / Producer

(April 15, 1935 – February 1, 2008) Tony Silver was a native of New York City, where he attended Columbia University and briefly pursued an acting career, before becoming the leading independent maker of movie trailers on the east coast. He began making his own films in 1970. Following Style Wars, he directed and produced a feature documentary, Arisman Facing The Audience, tracing the artistic and spiritual journeys from Manhattan to Guangzhou, China of Marshall Arisman, master painter, teacher, and storyteller, Marshall Arisman. Admired worldwide for uncompromising images of worldly violence and terror Arisman is seen as “an enchanter, a shaman,” perceived as a painter of “serial killer syndrome,” and the possessor of knowledge about the afterlife, that, says a colleague, he “won’t tell us [about it], he’s so fucking perverse.” Silver’s public television film Anita Ellis, For The Record documents a rare recording session by the legendary jazz-pop singer with the pianist Ellis Larkins. Broadcast on PBS and in England, Germany and Scandinavia. Silver’s first film, The Miss Nude America Movie (1970), documents the strange journey of a wheelchair-bound boy, founder of Naked City, Indiana. The film was shown at the New York Film Festival.

Henry Chalfant – Producer

Starting out as a sculptor in New York in the 1970s, Henry Chalfant turned to photography and film to do an in-depth study of hip-hop culture and graffiti art. He became one of the foremost authorities on New York subway art and other aspects of urban youth culture. His photographs record hundreds of ephemeral art works that have long since vanished. To Chalfant’s credit are three of the most influential documentations of aerosol art. He co-authored the book Subway Art (1984) with Martha Cooper and he co-produced the film Style Wars (1983) with the film’s director Tony Silver. In 1987 Chalfant co-authored the book Spraycan Art with James Prigoff, documenting the global expansion of graffiti. Each one of these documentary efforts have been embraced by the international graffiti community and they have served as cultural blueprints for graffiti art movements around the world. Chalfant also directed with Rita Fecher a documentary on South Bronx gangs, Flyin’ Cut Sleeves (1994) and he directed From Mambo to Hip Hop (2006) portraying two generations of Latino youth growing up in the South Bronx.