In the optics of law enforcement, there are no wins quite like the ritual display of guns, money, or drugs on a table. When the New York Police Department finally ensnared the graffiti artist Adam Cole, last week, a stack of stickers and a drum of glue sufficed. In the late eighties and early nineties, Cole was astonishingly prolific, blanketing the city with spray-painted stencils and wheat-pasted stickers bearing the name COST (as well as the occasional absurdist in-joke). After a fourteen-year hiatus, Cole’s COST tags reëmerged in 2010, grabbing the attention of the police department’s big-game hunters. Cole’s arrest was a reminder of how much had changed during his years away. Officers briefed by the department’s sophisticated, graffiti-busting Vandal Squad pinched Cole near the meatpacking district, where he had pasted some COST posters above a specialty wine shop.

If today’s New York seems pathologically obsessed with its own beautification, then the city’s long-standing war against graffiti helps to explain why. When the first wave of graffiti hit New York, in the early seventies, it was, in the eyes of sociologists and newspaper columnists, symbolic of a broken system. Never mind why the city’s youth sought empowerment by treating public property like their private scratch pads. Outrage over subway graffiti eventually underwrote the flawed, image-first “broken windows” theory of city management, which argued that any visible traces of petty vandalism fostered an all-enabling atmosphere of criminality. This is the unacknowledged backdrop of Manfred Kirchheimer’s bewitching, long-forgotten 1981 documentary “Stations of the Elevated.” Shot throughout the late seventies, “Stations of the Elevated” was the first film to capture scenes from the city’s emerging graffiti subculture. But this distinction did not rescue it from obscurity—neither did the Charles Mingus soundtrack. Prior to its recent restoration and current theatrical re-release, it was a difficult film to track down, which was unfortunate given Kirchheimer’s unique, meditative approach to the divisive subject.

“Stations” is a ragged and deeply impressionistic work, with most of its forty-five minutes spent watching people paint and waiting for trains to whir to life. Our gaze stays fixed upon an unblemished brick wall long enough for its plain, earthen redness to feel oppressively boring. There are certainly more cogent documentaries that explain the rise and appeal of graffiti—“Style Wars,” released two years later, is the best place to start. But Kirchheimer’s lack of interest in sociology doesn’t mean that his film lacks an argument. What makes “Stations of the Elevated” so absorbing are Kirchheimer’s playful juxtapositions, the way his quietly judgmental camera-eye makes the sanctioned city seem so unnatural and strange. An anonymous boy’s scrawl next to a corporation’s hectoring advertisement: maybe neither of these messages improves your morning commute. Zoom out and regard the elevated tracks, the way the subway train violently screams across the peaceful blue sky. Suddenly, the trains themselves seem like the noisy irritant, polluting the landscape. The graffiti mural adorning one moving train seems to editorialize on behalf of the city itself: “Earth is Hell.”

Given the tumult of late-seventies New York, “Stations” is a remarkably quiet experience. There are stretches in which we literally watch paint dry. We hear birds chirping, the rattle of aerosol spray cans, the laughter of children who have repurposed an old mattress into their own amusement park. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Kirchheimer’s film is its lack of narration. There are barely any voices at all. Instead of firm guidance, the music of Charles Mingus narrates on Kirchheimer’s behalf, the tumbling bass lines tracing the woozy angles of the riotous art work.

Graffiti no longer represents the menace it did in the seventies and eighties. It’s arguable whether most New Yorkers even find it offensive anymore. It is part of the romantic, rough-and-tumble past, preserved in museums and coffee-table books. You are just as likely to see graffiti on the streets of Brooklyn as on the Web site announcing a new Brooklyn condo, an evocative signifier of urban bona fides. Graffiti quietly anticipated the look and feel of contemporary advertising, from guerrilla marketing to the notion that every surface was a potential billboard. Throughout “Stations,” Kirchheimer wondered about this relationship between graffiti and advertising. Why was the city’s cluttered signage preferable to these colorful murals? He contrasted graffiti’s lightning-quick scofflaws with workers slaving over hand-painted billboards: an enormous cheeseburger suspended over an apartment tower, a seductive face that begins to seem alien and predatory because we have stared at it for too long. Another massive sign cranes above a line of trees, its words completely unnecessary: “Introducing Fresh Air.”

The New York of “Stations” indirectly resulted in the New York of today, which is cleaner and calmer but much more expensive. More importantly, it is a city where the lessons of the seventies are reborn as noise pollution ordinances and stop-and-frisk policing. By the time of Cole’s rampant COST tagging in the late eighties and early nineties, graffiti had become a key piece of this broader strategy to police “quality of life” violations. I visited Manhattan for the first time around then, and I remember seeing stickers by COST and his partner, REVS, everywhere: on buildings, trucks, cranes, ladders, lampposts, crosswalk signals, stop signs. It troubled me that I could not decode their meaning. What were they selling? When I learned that the answer was nothing, I was confused and then astonished.