From graffiti and rapping to breaking and politicking, hip-hop's multimedia birth was chronicled in Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's indispensable 1983 documentary Style Wars. Now Chalfant has taken to Kickstarter to fund preservation of the movie's culturally important outtakes.
"Style Wars was edited to its 69-minute length from the original 30 hours, so there's a lot of amazing and historically significant material there, which never made it into the finished film," Chalfant says in the Kickstarter pitch reel above. "The original film was not a commercial project, but was made with public funding. So it really does belong to you, the enthusiasts."
So far, contributors have kicked in nearly $5,000 of the project's $28,000 goal. The money will go to turn Style Wars's temporal snapshot of hip-hop's origins and New York City's gritty past into a hi-def Blu-ray release. There's still a month to go, so spread the word and let us know in the comments section below if you think that hip-hop's 21st-century evolution has lived up to the latent potential it exhibited in Style Wars. Haven't seen it? Stream it for free for one week only on Pitchfork.
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