Hip-Hop • Criterion Channel Teaser

Now playing on the Criterion Channel! Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of hip-hop with this mixtape of the cultural phenomenon’s finest movie moments, featuring a stunning line-up of legendary musical figures including A Tribe Called Quest, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, RZA, Nas, Ice Cube, MC Lyte, and DJ Kool Herc. It was Herc who, at a Bronx dance party on August 11, 1973, first used two turntables to create an instrumental “break beat,” an innovation that sent the crowd wild. This modest New York origin story inspired an unparalleled nationwide, then global, explosion encompassing music, dance, public art, fashion, and, eventually, cinema. This dynamic program spotlights the many ways that hip-hop has intersected with film, showcasing raw early documents of the scene’s key players, intimate and informative portraits of musical expertise and technical wizardry, and definitive, star-studded evocations of the culture’s impact.