{"id":5609,"date":"2012-10-11T16:49:52","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T20:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5609"},"modified":"2014-05-23T14:30:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T18:30:36","slug":"film-requiem-for-detroit-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5609","title":{"rendered":"Film: Requiem for Detroit? (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to: <\/strong>Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>P to R<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Film: Excellent \/ DVD Transfer: \u00a0n\/a \/ DVD Extras: n\/a<\/p>\n

Label: n\/a\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a<\/p>\n

Genre: Documentary \/ Detroit \/ Urban Decline<\/p>\n

Synopsis: Rather scathing chronicle of Detroit’s decline from America’s 4th largest city to its most violent and depressed.<\/p>\n

Special Features: n\/a<\/p>\n

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Review:<\/p>\n

This BBC production has a somewhat exploitive feel, as though it was designed to hype the worst aspects of Detroit\u2019s decline \u2013 urban, economic, and certain social messiness \u2013 so former music video director Julien Temple (Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten<\/strong>, The Rolling Stones: At the Max<\/strong>, Absolute Beginners<\/strong>) can craft his montages of archival footage and music samples, but it doesn\u2019t take long to realize Requiem for Detroit?<\/strong> is a taut chronicle of how the founding minds of the big car companies (namely Henry Ford) were significantly responsible for the racial tensions that erupted in 1967, and led to the city’s disheartneing decline.<\/p>\n

Whereas the recent Detropia<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(2012) deals almost exclusively with citizens struggling to maintain dignity and a roof over their families as companies pack up leave, Requiem<\/strong> is a scathing indictment of the companies which maintained racial divisions among whites and blacks from Detroit, and migrant workers from the South who travelled far for better paying jobs and the middle class dream; and the fostering of car consumerism (if not consumerism in general) whereby people were behaviorally shaped to wanting the newer better more expensive vehicles every few years.<\/p>\n

According to Temple, Detroit\u2019s singular reliance on the manufacturing, distribution, sales, and repair of cars (which Temple dubs as a \u2018golden goose\u2019 business) set it up for being unable to reorganize when there was a catastrophe, and a history of bad race relations made it a natural powder keg; when things erupted in \u201967, chunks of the downtown were looted and set ablaze, lasting a week, with many deaths and injured. The remaining whites who didn\u2019t move to the suburbs for bigger plots of land during the fifties pulled out, leaving an 8 mile tract of nothingness between the wealthy white \u2018burbs, and poorer downtown core. As chronicled in Who Killed the Electric Car?<\/a><\/strong> (2006), Detroit\u2019s auto giants had rejected smaller fuel efficient designs, and the spike in oil during the early seventies allowed foreign auto makers to meet the demand of affordable transportation, weakening the American firms who in turn began to close down some of the largest manufacturing plants on the continent.<\/p>\n

Temple interweaves the past with the present, constantly contrasting the city\u2019s glory with the ruins of the past, from flattened neighbourhoods that resemble prairie settlements, to grand hotels and office buildings. The most bitterly ironic segment covers the Detroit Michigan Theatre, the elegant movie palace built on the site where Ford crafted his first car which lost money because it lacked a parking garage, and was gutted and retrofitted for parking<\/a> to make money<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The indignities to local culture also extend to the Lee Plaza Hotel<\/a>, where Temple, his guide, and the camera crew can hear scrap metal plunderers removing material from the upper floors before they\u2019re dumped down an already stripped elevator shaft for ground-level reclamation. The Lee is reportedly where Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong once played, and is in such retched condition there\u2019s little doubt it\u2019ll one day crumble to the ground, as was the case with the Packard Plant \u2013 then the biggest building in the world \u2013 which shows signs of advance blowtorch incisions for later reclamation.<\/p>\n

Temple visits locations with urban explorers and is given tours by local guides, and what emerges is a very compact but detail-heavy depiction of the city\u2019s decline and current state, with archival footage and stills complimenting some of the memories and views of the doc\u2019s raconteurs.<\/p>\n

Although made two years prior to Detropia<\/strong>, Requiem<\/strong> features a lot more nitty-gritty details about racism and the delusional behaviour of corporate and city forefathers, and it functions as both a complimentary work and an antidote to the less critical viewpoint of Detropia<\/strong>\u2019s directors. It\u2019s not that either party is wrong in their investigation of Detroit\u2019s decline, but Requiem<\/strong> doesn\u2019t temper the venality and hopelessness of its interview subjects. Even though a younger generation is moving into the downtown core, there\u2019s a post-apocalyptic tone to Requiem<\/strong>\u2019s interpretation of their arrival \u2013 less about cheap rent and the potential for setting down family roots, and more about exploiting the space and prairie ruins to set up their own farm-like settlements.<\/p>\n

The veterans who\u2019ve lived in the city also make specific corrections to popular nomenclature: the \u201967 race riots were needed rebellions after decades of racism, and the city\u2019s been abandoned by the federal government because urban decay is less audacious than a 9\/11 assault, or a Hurricane Katrina.<\/p>\n

Requiem<\/strong> is heavily doom-laden, and Temple frequently uses up-tempo Motown songs with happy lyrics against images of injustice and social unrest. Even the smallest of positive reclamation projects \u2013 Goodwill\u2019s program of stripping down derelict homes for their recyclable goods \u2013 feels pointless when so much is wrong.<\/p>\n

Not a happy film, but a provocative historical chronicle of a city\u2019s terrible decline.<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2012 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IMDB <\/a><\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> <\/em>\/\u00a0P to R<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews \/ P to R \u00a0 Film: Excellent \/ DVD Transfer: \u00a0n\/a \/ DVD Extras: n\/a Label: n\/a\/ Region: n\/a\u00a0\/\u00a0Released: n\/a Genre: Documentary \/ Detroit \/ Urban Decline Synopsis: Rather scathing chronicle of Detroit’s decline from America’s 4th largest city to its most violent and depressed. Special Features: n\/a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[1579],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1st","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5609"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8980,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5609\/revisions\/8980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}