The Words of Prophets: 10 Great Uses of Graffiti in Movies

"The famous newspaper adage has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. But what does that say for movies, with their 24 frames per second? That amounts to an awful lot of reading matter, and cinemas are not libraries—we go to watch, and received wisdom has it that movies are a visual medium, a form of pictorial storytelling, light on the word-count. Still, it can't be denied that a lot of great movie moments have been provided by words marked crudely on to bare surfaces… Hip-hop has spawned a genre of films in which graffiti is a sub-category, but this list takes a broader approach to the subject: one that, like filmmakers the world over, recognizes graffiti as a form with a history: used by political activists to make statements, by street gangs to mark territory, by school-kids to express their displeasure at their teachers or their peers." —Kaleem Aftab, in *10 Bad Dates with De Niro: A book of Alternative Movie Lists* (2007), edited by Richard Kelly.