In a recent article leading graffiti magazine CLOUT pays homage to the 1979 New York City martial arts cult classic THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL. BRINKmedia was instrumental in putting the art house film out on DVD in 2007, digitally mastered and with commentary (including tips on filmmaking) from the director who started with THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL and went on to make the seminal hip-hop film WILD STYLE.

WILD STYLE would not exist if director Charlie Ahearn hadn’t visited lower Manhattan’s Alfred E. Smith projects in the late 70’s, where he began filming local kids practicing martial arts at Nathan Ingram’s studio called The Deadly Art of Survival. Ahearn said he made his first film to be a reflection of the community. 

“I went into the Smith Projects in 1977, before all of this stuff, and there was a DJ playing cuts of James Brown’s Soul Power,” Ahearn said. “In the room was rows of guys facing each other. At the time I had not scene these before. To me, it looked African to me. They were not doing anything special, but they were dropping, kicking one leg out. That was Uprocking. The other thing, I became or I was seeing, Lee Quinones’s graffiti murals around Smith Projects. This is ’77, I had not met him yet.”

He used his Super 8 camera to create a fictionalized film about Ingram but real-life details, neighborhood graffiti and the exalting of kung fu heroes like Bruce Lee, seep through the scripted scenes. 

Ahearn takes fault for the film’s weak points but as Nigel Clarke (author of the CLOUT article and creator of hip hop inspired kung fu comics) points out, these are overlooked once you realize the film’s importance from both a hip hop and martial arts perspective. It is a real look at the area and its influences. And it introduced Ahearn to the hip-hop, break-dancing and graffiti movements sprouting up in lower Manhattan at the time.

After Ahearn released THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL, he struck up a relationship with emcee Fab Five Freddie and graffiti artist Quinoes. They decided to collaborate on a movie about the intersection of graffiti and rap music. Ahearn said not only did filming THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL introduce him to the underground scenes that would become his filmmaking focus, the short-comings of his first film informed the second. 

“WILD STYLE was created as a commercial film. It had a simple storyline, I avoided a lot of talking scenes, which I thought was my weakness in DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL,” he said. “They looked bad, they sounded bad. I later wished, I remained closer as a documentarian and inspired them to do more things for the camera, just basically showing who they were. The story got in the way, the amateur story gets in the way of the profound actual story which I think, Nathan’s story in this community is profound. Instead of making a film that was a reflection of this high school’s fantasies, I would have, I should have spent more time on what they really were doing.”

And WILD STYLE has come to be accepted as the seminal hip-hop film, representing a community who’s style would eventually be recognized around the world. Clarke’s recent article is evidence, Ahearn’s films continue to inform participants in the hip-hop, graffiti and kung fu worlds nearly 30 years later.