The Subway Series: Tunnel Stories and Spraymasters



Sunday, April 14 at 7:30pm. Suggested donation $9

We are located at 322 Union Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

This is the third screening in Cinebeasts two month long Subway Series film festival. This screening will focus on the artists, taggers, and vandals, who make their mark underground in tunnels and on trains. It features the short film Tunnel Stories followed by the featured doc SprayMasters, along with a couple other short subway-related surprises.

Beneath New York City, there is a book being written on the walls of tunnels and underground passageways. Raw, honest, and fascinating, Tunnel Stories provides a rare glimpse into the world of the graffiti artists who see subway tunnels as a playground, gallery, and lifestyle. Hear the stories of why these artists, writers, taggers, and vandals risk arrest, injury, or even death in pursuit of their clandestine lifestyle.

In SprayMasters, four ex-graffiti artists reflect on their early years as renegades who snuck into rail yards and decorated New York City subway cars with stolen paint while eluding arrest. Now in their forties and embraced by the establishment, Lee Quinones, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000 are prominent artists with an international following, while Zephyr is a widely published journalist who writes about graffiti and popular culture.

They talk about the extreme risks they took as teenagers, the joys of seeing their work on subway cars, the diverse styles of graffiti, its global reach, and its place in modern life, where it has been co-opted by advertising and fashion. Directed by Manny Kirchheimer (Tall), SprayMasters is a follow-up to his underground classic Stations of the Elevated (1980), one of the first films to feature New York’s infamous subway graffiti.

Although the exuberant painted trains are gone, they live again in SprayMasters in rare, never-before-seen footage, set to an electrifying original musical soundtrack that evokes the heyday of graffiti. (The Cinema Guild)

Cinebeasts is a New York based collective of film nerds, vidiots, and programmers investigating the furthest reaches of the moving image universe. Since 2009 we have explored the limits of not only what to screen, but also where? and how? From the early days throwing gritty VHS tapes onto the basement wall of an LES Puerto Rican restaurant, to the more recent “Gowanderlust” – a renegade film screening + walking tour around the Gowanus Canal – we believe the context of a screening can – and should – be just as interesting as the content.

www.uniondocs.org/2013-04-14-subway-series