Wild Style

A group of people dancing in front of a wall covered in bold graffiti. One of the people in the air doing a backflip and another is holding a large boom box.

Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style is the ultimate cinematic record of Hip Hop’s early days, capturing the culture's 4 core artistic elements—graffiti, DJing, MCing, and breaking—right where it all started in the South Bronx. Instead of going for a typical Hollywood feel, Ahearn used a semi-documentary style, following graffiti artist Zoro (played by the legendary painter Lee Quiñones) to highlight the friction between raw street art and the professional art scene in Manhattan. It works perfectly as both a story and a cultural time capsule, especially with real-deal performances from icons like The Cold Crush Brothers, The Fantastic 5, Grandmaster Flash, and the Rock Steady Crew.

By showing the skill, effort, and community behind the 4 Hip Hop elements, Wild Style basically introduced Hip Hop to the rest of the world. It also pushed back against critics who tried to write Hip Hop off as unsophisticated noise, vandalism, or a passing trend. Decades later, it is still considered the definitive Hip Hop movie, giving us an honest look at a local scene that grew into a massive global movement. In the early 2010’s Cornell University Library’s Hip Hop Collection added Charlie Ahearn’s Hip Hop archive to its holdings. 

This special screening of Wild Style will feature the newly restored 4K version of the film, and will be followed by a guest panel featuring director Charlie Ahearn, and lead actor Lee Quiñones, and will be moderated by assistant curator of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection Ben Ortiz.

Cosponsored by Cornell University Library’s Hip Hop Collection.

Part of our "Restorations & Rediscoveries" series. Courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA).

Top