Requiem for Detroit. Right now on BBC2.

[Whitehouse]

Damn shame I tuned in during the program and missed the first half. Right now there's a documentary playing on BBC2.

BBC2 link.

Julien Temple's new film 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.
But its intense race riots brought the army into the city. With 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 per cent of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks, houses and collapsing car plants, and swallows up street lights.

They also shot some scenes in the United Artists theater! Using projectors tp show scenes of Detroit. First movie footage showing in that theater for ages! Pity there was no audience....

I recorded it with my handycam, there was no other way at the moment. I recorded the bit in which the UA is featured. That last sentence was telling.

Youtube link.

[eno]

I get a message "Not Available In Your Area" when I try to access it.

[Whitehouse]

I get a message "Not Available In Your Area" when I try to access it.

Yeah, I know. Rights and such. Here in the Netherlands we do have the BBC on our cable. Let's hope there's a torrent in the near future available. As gloomy as the message of the documnetary is, leave it to the BBC to make a masterpiece of it. You know their nature documentaries are world famous.

I would have recorded some more footage but somehow something welnt wrong technically. But I managed to record two more clips. The first one is about a man who grew up on the other side of 8 mile road and went back to the neighborhood in which he gre up. And it's a painful return.

The third clip is about how the Heidelberg project was started. Aslo the rave culture in Detroit is featured here. I just heard this week in a radio interview with DJ Tiesto that Richie Hawtin in the meantime has gone deaf.

In the meantime another Detroit documentary has started right now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009372j

About the music in Detroit. And no, they didn't start at Motown.

KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!!

[Whitehouse]

Oops, Double.

[leland_palmer]

I get a message "Not Available In Your Area" when I try to access it.

All you need to do is enter a proxy server address from the UK into your browser network settings.

[rjlj]

It is going to be interesting to hear Richie Hawtin doing his live Plastikman show at Hart Plaza while being deaf. I am pretty sure he is not deaf unless it has happened within the past week.

[eno]

Hey Whitehouse, thanks for the looksee at clips from the BBC doc.

leland palmer, i'm not sure how to do what you suggest but I research it and see if it does. thanks

[buildingsofdetroit]

All you need to do is enter a proxy server address from the UK into your browser network settings.

Leland, can you help some of us technological idiots figure out how this works? I'd really LOVE to see this.

[Whitehouse]

And as a final program to their Detroit themed night the BBC is now showing Gridlock'd.

[buildingsofdetroit]

How to watch it outside of the UK. Haven't tried this yet to see if it works, however:

http://hurwi.net/blog/?p=28

[leland_palmer]

How to watch it outside of the UK. Haven't tried this yet to see if it works, however:

http://hurwi.net/blog/?p=28

I've never tried that before.

All you really have to do a search on Proxy list, or proxy servers. Find one that is located in the UK then in Firefox go to options-network tab-settings click on the "manual proxy configuration" radio button then fill in the HTTP Proxy and the Port Number.

Then, it's a matter of trial and error to find one that will work. It can be frustrating at times finding one, and they are usually good for only a few days.

[leland_palmer]

And as a final program to their Detroit themed night the BBC is now showing Gridlock'd.

Are they running "The Motor City's Burning" again?

[Lowell]

Looking forward to seeing this. I interviewed for it driving around in their 72 caddy and they promised me the DVD.

[Patrick]

To be honest, I have never fully understood the European fascination with Detroit. It seems that they are more intersted in Detroit than say Austin or Chicago but why? We did a thread about this like 4 or 5 years ago lol.

[eno]

Detroit is the source of so much music that they love.

[Lowell]

Detroit has almost mythological status in the European mind from bygone days as the Arsenal of Democracy and being synonymous with the automobile. They understand the significance of the Model T factory as the plant that changed the world. Over the years I have met many who had trekked here to see it and Motown. It both surprised and enlightened me as, like most Americans, I took them for granted as part of the landscape. Likewise, to see Detroit so fallen becomes magnified by those preconceptions.

[Cooper]

I haven't seen the film yet, but I found this preview in the Guardian offensive:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/...-urban-decline

I know Detroit's decay can be shocking, but the director revels in it, exaggerating the details to make Detroit seem as frightening and hopeless as possible:

Law and order has completely broken down in the inner city, drugs and prostitution are rampant and unless you actually murder someone the police will leave you alone ... The abandoned houses make great crack dens and provide cover for appalling sex crimes and child abduction. The only growth industry is the gangs of armed scrappers, who plunder copper and steel from the ruins. Rabid dogs patrol the streets. All the national supermarket chains have pulled out of the inner city. People have virtually nowhere to buy fresh produce. Starbucks? Forget it.

You'd never guess from reading it that Detroit has 850,000+ residents, or that any of those residents have jobs and take pride in their neighborhoods, or that, yes, you can get a cup of Starbucks if you try.

[LeannaM]

Post from a British forum. Granted, it's just one person's post, but interesting nonetheless.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...4#post38990324

There's not many other posts about Detroit, though, except for complaints about being patted down at Detroit's airport.

[leland_palmer]

I haven't seen the film yet, but I found this preview in the Guardian offensive:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/...-urban-decline

I know Detroit's decay can be shocking, but the director revels in it, exaggerating the details to make Detroit seem as frightening and hopeless as possible:

You'd never guess from reading it that Detroit has 850,000+ residents, or that any of those residents have jobs and take pride in their neighborhoods, or that, yes, you can get a cup of Starbucks if you try.

Did you read the entire article?

On many levels Detroit seems to be an insoluble disaster with urgent warnings for the rest of the industrialised world. But as George and I made our film we discovered, to our surprise, an irrepressible positivity in the city. Unable to buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms and kick-starting what is now the fastest-growing movement across the US. Although the city is still haemorrhaging population, young people from all over the country are also flooding into Detroit – artists, musicians and social pioneers, all keen to make use of the abandoned urban spaces and create new ways of living together.

With the breakdown of 20th-century civilisation, many Detroiters have discovered an exhilarating sense of starting over, building together a new cross-racial community sense of doing things, discarding the bankrupt rules of the past and taking direct control of their own lives. Still at the forefront of the American Dream, Detroit is fast becoming the first "post-American" city. And amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer's map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all.

So perhaps Detroit can avoid the fate of the lost cities of the Maya and rise again like the phoenix that sits, appropriately, on its municipal crest. That is why George and I decided to call our film Requiem for Detroit? – with a big question mark at the end.

[lafayette]

"But its intense race riots brought the army into the city...With violent union struggles..." meaning: the 1967 riots and union troubles brought the city down.

I'm not watching any documentary that says Detroit's demise is based on this uneducated, stereotypical, knee-jerk, not-researched premise. They're completely wrong.

If you know why, I don't need to write all the details here. And if you don't know why this is wrong, I don't have enough time to tell you why in this space. Read Sugrue's bible about the demise of Detroit to learn the real reasons.

[Whitehouse]

What lafayette mentioned, it was explained pretty clear what the riots were all about in the music documentary that followed this one. I did record that one and I will post some clips of it this coming weekend. It was said the riots erupted due to the white population leaving the city and blacks were left behind. Police however remained white and the black people were fed up with intimidation and opression by the police. Is this about right?

[lafayette]

Whitehouse, that's kind of in the general ballpark, albiet missing some key points, about the cause of the riots. But this thread was about the documentary's subject, which is the demise of Detroit. The documentary isn't about what caused the riots.

My point is Detroit's demise wasn't triggered by two, key traumatic events [[riots and union troubles), as devastating as the riots and corporations leaving the city for nonunion pastures in the suburbs were. To focus primarily on those two events when looking at the city's demise is woefully oversimplistic and sensational. The city's demise was caused over a looooooooong period of time because of a handful of dramatic events and a ton of not-so-dramatic, everyday events.

Again, for a complete explanation, Thomas Sugrue literally and figuratively wrote the book [[not the only book) on the demise. Please read it.

[Django]

4.18 minute clip on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgC5whSP8E

Lowell and Sinclair are in it.

[lizaanne]

4.18 minute clip on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgC5whSP8E

Lowell and Sinclair are in it.

Is this part of the BBC2 production?

My in-laws are English and are retired in Scotland. They watched the show and found it very interesting, but they don't know enough about Detroit to really know how accurate it is. But my father-in-law did liken it to one of their own major cities, a steel town like Pittsburgh, Sheffield England was devastated when the steel business went away. But they have been able to reinvent themselves successfully, and I think it is a wonderful and thriving city now. They still have their bad areas and crime, but at least it's not a bombed out shell in vast chunks. But when I'm there it is a really nice city with outstanding public transportation [[a tram system we only dream about) and great shopping, a University, and much more. Detroit could do this - it just needs the people with the vision and ability to do it - and none of the political game playing garbage that goes on today.

[Whitehouse]

That's indeed from the very documentary. It must be something from the part that I missed or a theatrical trailer, cause there are also some things I did see. But as said above, at the end there are also signs shown of some glimmers of hope and resilliance. So not all is gloom and doom in this docu. The use of projecting footage is done throughout the doxumentary. Nice to see you Lowell!