Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody


By S. T. VANAIRSDALE
Published: October 15, 2006


“As soon as you start talking to a graffiti writer, the first thing you realize is that they have a lot to say,” said Mr. Pray, whose graffiti chronicle, “Infamy,” will be released Tuesday on DVD by Image Entertainment. “To practice their art, they’ve had to live in the most extreme situations. They’ve been chased by cops. They’ve fallen off of buildings. They’ve done their art amongst the homeless. They’ve been in alleys. They’ve been kicked out of their homes. To really do graffiti and to do it right — if you’re a true lifelong graffiti writer — you’ve been through all this.”

Nearly 25 years ago the documentary “Style Wars,” directed by Tony Silver, helped make the nascent graffiti movement a subject of fascination around the world. And now a fresh crop of movies about graffiti culture, including “Infamy” and the fiction feature “Quality of Life,” are attracting audiences with intense, moody depictions of street art in action. Meanwhile do-it-yourself franchises like “Videograf” have enjoyed a DVD revival since their heyday in the early 90’s, introducing “bombers” and other outlaw artists to an international audience.

“It’s become more and more popular over the years because it’s this ultimate form of urban rebellion,” Benjamin Morgan, who directed “Quality of Life,” said of graffiti culture. “It’s in your face and it’s saying, ‘I’m going to do what you don’t want me to, and I’m going to make a name for myself.’ ”

In tracking the hazards and dynamics of “getting up” (as graffiti painting is known among practitioners), the current wave of films portray subjects haunted by their compulsions. “Infamy,” for instance, follows “taggers” as they mark buildings and trains in broad daylight, then reflects on the costs and injuries their acts impose on them and those close to them.

“Usually he comes back in the morning,” one artist’s girlfriend confides to Mr. Pray. “Those are good nights, right?”

And while “Style Wars” and the 1983 fiction feature “Wild Style” evoked a movement made jubilant by its own boundlessness, the recent graffiti films often take place against a backdrop of violence, sexism and homophobia. The title character of “The Graffiti Artist,” directed by James Bolton, is an alienated gay youth, while “Infamy” profiles both the gay artist Earsnot and the celebrated New York female writer Claw Money.

“My whole trip is chicks in graffiti,” said Ms. Money, who uses her graffiti name professionally as a fashion designer and whose memoir, “Bombshell” (powerHouse), is due out early next year. “What makes Doug’s movie different is that it has this feminism aspect, and it has the gay aspect. Other people need to know that there are people like me and him out there. It isn’t just this macho club of morons and thugs and stuff.”

Contemporary graffiti films also function as a sort of anthropological guide, informing viewers, for example, of the nine types of tags in Philadelphia or urban customs in Brazil. Pablo Aravena’s “Next: A Primer on Urban Painting” (screening Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) conflates graffiti, design, architecture and advertising in world capitals like Tokyo, London and Paris. The tribal squabbles threading through documentaries from “Style Wars” to “Infamy” even extend to artists’ perceptions of the films themselves, the graffiti historian Eric Felisbret said.

“Some purists feel that the sole vehicle to fame is painting your graffiti, period,” he said. “But others feel that when you’ve reached a certain level and media attention is drawn, that’s an accomplishment in itself. And that’s very desirable. Throughout the whole graffiti culture, a lot of things are contradicted.”

For “Quality of Life” Mr. Morgan wrote with and eventually cast Brian Burnam, a well-known graffiti artist from San Francisco. The pair created a tale from their acquaintances’ harrowing stories of fights, police raids and family discord, interlacing the narrative with sequences of legal and illegal tagging.

“I’ve seen some graffiti films that were all about graffiti,” Mr. Morgan said. “Every scene was about graffiti, and all they talked about was graffiti. Graffiti writers hated those movies. We didn’t want to do that at all. We just wanted to show what these guys were going through on a day-by-day basis. Brian was excited about that, because this is the life he was living.”

Affirming its crossover appeal with a premiere at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival and a MySpace.com marketing campaign that has attracted more than 15,000 fans on the site, Mr. Morgan’s $30,000 film has spawned a book, “Putting the Pieces Together” (Soft Skull Press), endorsing the “graffiti model for independent filmmaking”: keep a small crew, find your spot, and shoot fast. “When you’re bombing,” the director said, “you don’t have to get it right.”

That ethos is particularly well captured in “Videograf,” Carl Weston’s series of films featuring a parade of artists tagging rail yards, subways and just about any New York exterior to which paint would stick. A veritable highlight reel of vandalism, Mr. Weston’s tapes were seized by the police in May 2000 and finally returned after a four-year legal battle. He has rereleased the material on five DVD’s, the most recent of which reached stores last month.

Intended primarily for graffiti artists, “Videograf” has nevertheless become a stylistic benchmark for a number of documentaries and features, including “Quality of Life” and other magazine-style DVD’s like the hugely popular “State Your Name.”

“The business is different in the sense that I don’t sell as many videos today as I did, say, in 1993,” said Mr. Weston, who sells “Videograf” and other titles through GraffitiVideos.com, his Web site. “There are hundreds of DVD’s out on the market now. I had a monopoly from 1989 and no real competition of any significance until two or three years ago. If you wanted to see outlaw graffiti bombing, we had it. There was no contest. I was the one in the yards or out on the street risking life and limb to get this footage, and no one was able to approach us until relatively recently.”

At the closet-size graffiti supply store Scrapyard in SoHo, the proprietor, Mark Awfe, keeps 15 titles of “Videograf” in stock behind the glass at the front counter. He estimated that in a good month he sells 60 DVD’s and fields hundreds of phone calls inquiring about new releases.

Meanwhile the subculture has embraced Mr. Pray, the reluctant graffiti filmmaker. Scores of artists applauded “Infamy” at its 2005 premiere in Manhattan, and Mr. Weston called it the best graffiti documentary since “Style Wars.”

“Graffiti is beautiful, and it can be legal, and anybody can do it,” Mr. Pray said. “But you don’t realize that anybody who has devoted their entire life to it has had a life of hell. That’s why this film is a lot darker than people expected me to make. But it wasn’t my choice.”