Manfred Kirchheimer died on July 16 at age 93. In addition to being a longtime instructor of film production at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he was an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His motion pictures are factual, and they also were artful, even occasionally avant-garde. Learning that his teachers were Hans Richter and Jay Leyda, it is no wonder that his own styles show the influences of these and other acclaimed European and American film artists/historians.
Kirchheimer’s first film was Colossus on the River in 1963. It cost him $3,500 out of pocket. After making several films over the next decade, most focusing on urban-related topics, he was awarded a grant for $10,000 from the American Film Institute/National Endowment for the Arts program. In 1979-80, he used that money and his own, to produce Stations of the Elevated, one of his best-known films, which was shown at the 1981 New York Film Festival.
Stations of the Elevated, which is available for viewing on the Internet Archive and Amazon Prime, is a type of documentary called a city symphony. This genre combines the factual with the experimental or art film genre. The appearance and lifestyles of big cities are mingled. A wonderful example is Berlin, Symphony of a Great City by Walter Ruttmann from 1929. If you see A Bronx Morning, Jay Leyda’s city symphony from 1931, you will pick up Leyda’s influence on Kirchheimer. I should add that it was my great fortune also to have had Leyda as my professor at NYU many years ago.
While making occasional twists and turns visually, Stations of the Elevated in its most basic form follows the Lexington Avenue subway trains from the South Bronx through the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. The South Bronx, in particular, is a study in urban decay, with its rubble and unsightly sprawl.
Kirchheimer’s 45-minute film begins with an image of inanimate subway cars. We see their tops, not their sides. They are a conflation of shapes, not so much objects. The colors are rusty browns and greys. Right away, this is an art film, not the straight-forward reportage of the nightly news. Soon the screen opens up to the sides of subway cars. This is the late seventies, the age of graffiti. Suddenly color abounds. The art of graffiti abounds. With these new visuals, the musical score begins. A jazz score by Charles Mingus. Bright painted signs, large billboards are everywhere as the subway trains travel from Dyre Street to Utica Avenue. Occasionally an object appears in the foreground. Halfway into the film, children – moving human beings—appear.
This is no series of random shots. Kirchheimer has built a world—an urban world that is very much of its time. Mingled with an occasional shot of a clean modern skyscraper, the bulk of Stations of the Elevated shows trains covered in graffiti – from quite talented to crap.
Mingus’s musical score is not just laid down as a whole on a series of images; instead, it is creatively coupled with the images. We also hear slum kids jabbering away, and then, at the end, there is Aretha Franklin singing part of “Amazing Grace.”
In his 60 year career, Manfred Kirchheimer made a number of documentaries that remain available for viewing. In 1986, he made We Were So Beloved, distributed by First Run Features, about Holocaust survivors living in the New York City area. His film Free Time from 2019, also available, traces some of the changing landscape of New York City as urban renewal attempts of obliterate decay.
I want to thank Kirchheimer’s best friend and colleague, Everett Aison, for inspiring this commentary.
