NEW YORK, NY.- Manfred Kirchheimer, a filmmaker who was drawn to stickball, jazz, subway graffiti, gargoyles on old buildings and the memories of aging immigrants, and who after decades of slowpoke perfectionism earned a reputation as a master of nonfiction cinema, died July 16 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was cancer, his son Gabe said.

Kirchheimer often wrote, produced, directed and edited his movies as well as photographed them. He worked hard to get funding from nonprofit sources, and he earned a living as a freelance film editor and a film professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from the mid-1970s until the mid-2010s.

His camera moved at the speed of people-watching: lingering for an extra moment to relish a certain scene, turning to something else in the bounty of street sights, then returning his gaze somewhere it had already been, hungry for a second helping.

He found dignity and delight in what other New Yorkers overlooked or even disdained. Mayor Ed Koch, for instance, called subway graffiti blight, but Kirchheimer exulted in the subway exteriors of the late 1970s as traveling canvases. He made the subway the main character of his 1981 movie, “Stations of the Elevated,” with a soundtrack by Charles Mingus that suggested that graffiti could have the same rough, improvisational genius as his jazz.

The subway cars that Kirchheimer filmed featured a portrait of a hitchhiking snowman; a verdant landscape overseen by a smiling, big-eyed sun; and cryptic messages in bubble letters — “HEAVEN IS LIFE,” “am nor disaster!” He followed the trains from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, at the city’s northern edge, past South Bronx tenements whose stoops hosted playing children, all the way to the beaches of Coney Island.

The movie was the culmination of a style he had been developing over years of making meticulously crafted short films, such as “Claw” (1968), another dialogue-free study of the city, this one about the whimsical carvings of Manhattan’s old stone architecture and its replacement by impersonal glass towers.

Kirchheimer considered “Stations of the Elevated” his “big opus,” he told The New York Times in 2014. Yet after it was screened at the 1981 New York Film Festival, it received little attention, and no review by the Times. “It was probably the biggest disappointment of my life,” he said.

He tried to develop a new approach. In 1986, he came out with “We Were So Beloved,” his first movie belonging to a category he called “discussion film.” It investigated a community of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany living in Washington Heights. Kirchheimer himself had been one of them.

Manfred Alexander Kirchheimer was born March 2, 1931, in the western German city of Saarbrücken. His father, Berthold, was head of advertising for a department store and a newspaper caricaturist of visiting celebrities including Marlene Dietrich. His mother, Johanna (Stein) Kirchheimer, worked at her family’s boardinghouse.

In 1935, as restrictions on Jewish life in Germany tightened, Berthold was fired from his job, then rehired on the condition that he use only the rear entrance, so as not to be seen by customers. Earlier than many other Jews, he began planning to leave. With the help of two brothers in the United States, the family fled to New York in 1936 and settled in Washington Heights. By 1950, more than 20,000 Jews from Germany were living in the neighborhood.

Manfred Kirchheimer attended City College of New York, where he studied with Hans Richter, an avant-garde filmmaker and fellow German refugee. After graduating in 1952, he began teaching film himself. He also started to look down on the adults of his old neighborhood, he later recalled, believing that their retrograde attitudes toward other Washington Heights immigrant groups showed that they had failed to learn the lessons of their own oppression in Germany.

By middle age, however, Kirchheimer found himself newly reflective about the world of his youth. In “We Were So Beloved,” he interviewed his parents, an aunt, family friends, neighbors and old stickball buddies.

The movie’s title came from Kirchheimer’s father. In the film, he speaks sympathetically of the Germans, imagining how sad his old friends must have felt when, compelled by the social pressures of the Nazi regime, they had to cut ties with him. “We were so beloved,” he says.

Kirchheimer asks his father whether he would have hidden Jews had he been a German. A pained expression spreads across Berthold’s face, and he shakes his head. “I’m a coward,” he replies.

“Is my honest father speaking for me as well?” Kirchheimer says in the narration. “What kind of a person am I?”

Ultimately, he decides that he must hold himself to a higher moral standard.

“We Were So Beloved” was praised on its release — Vincent Canby of the Times called it a “fine, poignant documentary” — but afterward, Kirchheimer produced no new work for nearly 20 years.

Then, around the time he learned to use computer editing software, a new phase of his career began.

In 2006, he came out with “Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan,” a documentary about the history of the skyscraper and the architect who helped invent the form. Two years later, he was back with “Spraymasters,” a movie of interviews with the graffiti artists whose work he had filmed in “Stations of the Elevated.” Then, in 2014, “Stations” was screened again in New York. It got the reception Kirchheimer had longed for back in 1981.

Times film critic A.O. Scott called it a “visual poem” depicting “an older, rougher, achingly gorgeous New York,” a setting that enables the film to show “how beauty is discovered and made in unpromising circumstances.”

Scott became a champion of Kirchheimer’s work. In a review of “Canners” (2017), a documentary about people who scavenge recycling, Scott called Kirchheimer “an indispensable New York filmmaker, a noticer and a listener without peer.”

J. Hoberman, a film critic who had panned “Stations of the Elevated” in the 1980s, changed his mind, writing in the Times in 2016 that the movie “may be the single most evocative record of the vernacular expression damned and celebrated as Graffiti Art.”

As he neared his 90th birthday, Kirchheimer underwent a final artistic transformation.

Decades earlier, between 1958 and 1960, he and a friend had traveled around New York filming city scenes that they imagined would constitute a shared project titled “Dream of a City.” Kirchheimer wound up using some of the material in shorts, but nothing else happened.

Then he gave his old film another look.

“I just felt it was new material meant to be edited, and I was ready to edit it,” he said in 2020.

From 2018 to 2022, he released four new movies that included the footage he had shot more than half a century ago. The films unearthed scenes of old men reading newspapers in folding chairs and youngsters playing jacks with soda caps — urban life happening on sidewalks. In a review of one of the movies, “Free Time” (2019), Times film critic Ben Kenigsberg labeled Kirchheimer a “city symphonist.”

In addition to his son Gabe, Kirchheimer is survived by his wife, Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer; another son, Daniel; a grandson; and a step-granddaughter.

In 1986, Kirchheimer spoke to the Times about the pains of working slowly — how getting questions about “We Were So Beloved” before he finished it caused him to lower his eyes and shuffle his feet.

“But that’s who I am,” he said. “I simply wouldn’t let it out of my hands until I thought it was right.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.