Requiem for Detroit

Requiem For Detroit?

13th March 2010 - 21.00 on BBC2

Julien Temple’s new film for Films of Record is a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision: a slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims. Detroit was once America’s fourth largest city. Built by the car for the car, with its groundbreaking suburbs, freeways and shopping centres, it was the embodiment of the American dream.

With its intense race riots that brought the Army into the city, and violent union struggles against the fierce resistance of Henry Ford and the Big Three, it was also the scene of American nightmares.

Now it is truly a dystopic post-industrial city, in which 40% of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks and houses, and collapsing car plants and swallows up street lights. Police stations and post offices have been left with papers on the desks like the Marie Celeste. There is no more rush hour on what were the first freeways in America. Crime, vandalism, arson and dog fighting are the main activities in once the largest building in North America. But it’s also a source of hope.

Streets are being turned to art. Farming is coming back to the centre of the city. Young people are flocking to help. The burgeoning urban agricultural movement is the fastest growing movement in the US

Credits: Director Julien Temple
Producer: Georgina Hencken
Executive Producer: Roger Graef

Temple is a good film maker. I'm looking forward to wtaching this before I visit the city for the 2nd time in April.

I have emailed a friend of mine in the UK and asked him to download a copy from the broadcast and either upload it via email to me or send me a dvd print off the broadcast. I remember the production team being in town and due to some sort of strange internet restrictions the BBC never posts these for viewing.

Requiem for a Dream is a good film. It's more depressing than Detroit, but it's instructional, or maybe not.

"Requiem for Detroit" could be very interesting. Temple has a great reputation, of course, and when he and and his crew were in town last year, they had a big projector, and they projected scenes from films and videos on and inside various buildings. Examples: They flashed scenes of the 1967 riot on the train station, and they projected on an old, abandoned assembly line scenes of Martha and the Vandellas riding down an assembly line on Mustangs in the 1960s.

Does anyone/ any bar have BBC2 that would host a viewing party. Watched the Detroit Transit documentary at the painted lady in Hamtramck-was kinda fun.

Hopefully BBC America will run it...