As one of the only clubs booking hip-hop acts at the time, Mars hosted everyone from Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa to a young Jay‑Z, and provided a dancefloor free from boundaries, on which graffiti kids and sweat-drenched skateboarders were rubbing shoulders with hip-hop kids turning out looks. But to call Trip just a club night is an understatement. The convergence wouldn’t have happened without Mars – a multi-floor nightclub founded by Yuki Watanabe, located downtown in New York’s Meatpacking district from ’89 to ’92 – at which Eli Morgan Gesner and his friends started throwing a night called Trip. Narrated by streetwear pioneer Eli Morgan Gesner, the documentary outlines the initial racial division between hip-hop and skateboarding, how and why the two subcultures started to collide, and the story of how many of the streetwear giants came to be – from Phat Farm and Zoo York, to Supreme – as told through archive footage and the characters who shaped the scene: pro skateboarders Mike Carroll, Gino Iannucci, Keith Hufnagel (the founder of HUF) and Jefferson Pang (who today works at Supreme) and musicians Darryl McDaniels (of Run‑D.M.C.), Kid Capri, Kool Keith and Moby, amongst many others who lived it firsthand. Starting in the late ’80s, All the Streets Are Silent stories a time in which the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat had left a sizeable hole in New York that paved the way for the golden era of hip-hop – a movement that started on streets that were frequented by skateboarders and graffiti artists alike. In 2018, he shot and directed French artist JR’s Brooklyn Museum short film, The Chronicles of New York City. During the 2000s, Elkin put his name to a number of skate films including Elephant Direct (2010), and The Brodies (2013), before taking a job at Vanity Fair magazine heading up their digital video arm. As a teenager growing up in Canada, he spent his days listening to hip-hop, skateboarding on the streets of Montreal, and getting his first taste of filmmaking via late ’90s skate videos. It’s fitting, then, that All the Streets Are Silent mirrors Elkin’s personal interests. Together, the two worlds birthed a new visual language – apparent through style, graphics and sound – that would be referenced, pillaged and expanded upon for decades to come, as seen in Elkin’s first feature-length documentary. It’s set in late ’80s and early ‘90s Manhattan and chronicles a time in which the city’s sidewalks were thriving thanks to two landmark subcultures that started to collide: hip-hop and skateboarding. The streets in New York are anything but silent right now, but Jeremy Elkin’s upcoming documentary, All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding, first screened at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, takes us on a free-wheeling journey through a different time.
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