Henry Chalfant

Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's PBS documentary tracks the rise and fall of subway graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

From Henry Chalfant, the director genre defining documentary Style Wars, comes what was intended to be the first installment in a regular television series on New York's bludgeoning hip-hop culture, with a specific focus on graffiti. Funding fell through but the material was just to good be left to languish. Chalfant put together what he had and, like Style Wars, it continues to stand as a document of a culture in blossom.

Through interviews and performance clips, filmmaker Henry Chalfant explores the history of music in the South Bronx, from the Puerto Rican and Cuban influences that created the local salsa sound to the rise of hip-hop after fires destroyed the area. Artists appearing in this colorful documentary include Eddie Palmieri, Angel Rodríguez, Benny Bonilla, Clemente "Kid Freeze" Moreno, Ray Barretto, Willie Colón, Bobby Sanabria and many others.

"In this half-hour documentary, Producer Sandra King provides an intimate portrait of a public phenomenon: Graffiti. Over an 18 month period, King and her crew followed the teenage members of a graffiti 'crew,' Vandals on the Street, as they painted and rapped and moved through the streets of downtown Newark. What emerges is a unique glimpse behind the 'tags' at the kind of inner city kids who write on walls, but who also make art; who create out of wedlock children, but who also form binding relationships; who drop out of school and never read a book, but who create their own brand of poetry through the medium of 'rap.'