All The Streets Are Silent: A collage-doc of beats, rhymes and skateboards in '90s New York
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
A documentary about the intersecting hip-hop and skateboarding cultures in New York in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, All the Streets Are Silent, is more a collage or visual mixtape than a chronicle, and very much an inside job.
It’s directed by Jeremy Elkin, a former Montreal skater boy and Vanity Fair video producer, with narration from Eli Morgan Gesner. Gesner, a skater, streetwear clothing designer (Phat Farm, Zoo York) and style editor for the Uproxx news and entertainment site, is also a filmmaker, whose early footage is part of this loosely organized, energetic film.
The decade the film covers is one of slump and recovery, encompassing three mayors (Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani), the peak and waning of the AIDS crisis, and the crack epidemic. But the kaleidoscopic world of the film, the real action, was in places like Mars, a multi-floor club that opened in the late ‘80s in the meatpacking district where hip-hop and punks congregated.
We meet characters like Japanese-American impresario, Yuki Watanabe, or Arian Bartos (aka DJ Stretch Armstrong) whose Columbia University hip-hop radio show with Bobbito Garcia was essential listening.
There are accounts of the early days of soon-to-be rap royalty, including Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes and the Wu-Tang Clan. Mars was the joint where Vin Diesel was a bouncer and musician Moby got his first job as a DJ. It closed when it drew progressively more more violent. (In his online blog in 2007, Moby recalled: “It wasn’t uncommon, sadly, to show up for work and find out that one of the doormen had been shot the night before.”)
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Amidst the immersion of bro’ nostalgia for outlaw chic, danger thrills and an enthusiasm for sneakers and graffiti, there’s not much room for girls in All the Streets. Almost all the female screen time goes to actress Rosario Dawson. She made her teen-aged film debut, alongside Chloe Sevigny, in Larry Clark’s controversial cult hit, Kids, described by The New York Times as “Lord of the Flies with skateboards, nitrous oxide and hiphop…” The premature deaths of two of its stars, Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce, lends the documentary its end-of-an-era mournful conclusion.
(Coincidentally, 25 years after its release, Kids is the subject of another documentary at this year’s Tribeca film festival. The Kids, co-written by cast member, Hamilton Harris, explores how the non-professional actors’ lives were upended by their sudden notoriety).
Romanticization and exploitation often converge. Stripped of its warm memories, this could be an MBA study on turning local youth trends into global lifestyle commodities, inevitably leaving casualties along the way.
All The Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hiphop and Skateboarding (1987-1997). Directed by Jeremy Elkin. With Rosario Dawson, Stretch Armstrong, Moby, Fab Freddy and many others. The film is available virtually on July 23 through Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema (Toronto), The Cinematheque (Vancouver), virtually on July 23 and in the cinema on July 30.