Posted on 03/20/2005 6:17:14 AM PST by wingblade
DETROIT- A new documentary about Detroit will premiere tomorrow at the University of Michigan. The film traces the rise and ruin of the Motor City. Detroit Public Radio's Celeste Headlee reports:
Detroit: Ruin of a City is not a slick, expensively produced documentary like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Super Size Me. The film was made by two academics Michael Chanan from the University of the West of England in Bristol and George Steinmetz of the University of Michigan. They used a handheld digital camera and lots of archival tape. It cost about 20 thousand dollars to produce.
Steinmetz says Detroit is fascinating on many different levels. He says it's a legendary city because of the history of the auto industry and labor relations.
It's a mythic city for African-American culture and politics and it's a mythic city for certain kinds of modernism in art - Diego Rivera's DIA murals are world-renowned. Lafayette Park by Mies van der Rohe is world-renowned. This is a city that has been a glorious city. I've always loved this city, but I'm distressed by the abandonment.
Abandonment is a common theme in the film. The filmmakers take French sociologist Lo c Wacquant on a tour of the city, past the dilapidated but still beautiful train station, the once fabulous Michigan theatre and the boarded windows and crumbling facades of many buildings on Woodward. Wacquant is stunned to see Comerica Park on one side of the road and a vacant building on the other.
Why are you building new structures, spending millions of dollars building new sports structures and entertainment centers, when you have the historic heritage of the city's right here abandoned across the street. To a European it's totally incomprehensible.
Wacquant is nearly speechless as he gazes at vacant houses with sagging porches and trails of stained brick leading from the walls to the weed-choked lawns.
If it was a city of one million white people, of course you wouldn't have this urban decay, of course there would have been renewal, of course there would have been government intervention to bring in market forces that would benefit the city. But the story of Detroit is that it became a majority black city very quickly.
The documentary includes several local residents, including artist Tyree Guyton, photographer Lowell Boileau and even a homeless man who's leaving Detroit for Pontiac. Michael Chanan says he tried not to offer any answers or solutions in the film.
I think documentary is a form that should be an investigative form, an open form, a form that asks questions At the beginning of the film, there're some shots of the United Artists building and there's some graffiti on the windows and one of those graffiti is Question the media. That's what we have to do question the media.
George Steinmetz says there are many documentaries about Detroit, but very few that deal with the city's history.
We want these people to represent themselves. Detroit has been so systematically misrepresented in the mass media and Hollywood films and in the nightly news commercial television news for such a long time. We want to show that it wasn't always that way.
Detroit was such a beautiful city. It's location (halfway between Chicago and Toronto) should have made it a gem. What a waste.
Check the date...Should read 3/17/2005.
The BS detector is off the scale!
"If it was a city of one million white people, of course you wouldn't have this urban decay, of course there would have been renewal, of course there would have been government intervention to bring in market forces that would benefit the city. But the story of Detroit is that it became a majority black city very quickly."
"Why are you building new structures, spending millions of dollars building new sports structures and entertainment centers, when you have the historic heritage of the city's right here abandoned across the street."
Why?
The reason is called LIBERALISM.
*chuckle*
Interesting though, they caught the current conditions of the historic buildings on tape.
Sounds fairly fascinating.
Been to Akron, Ohio, lately ? Same story on a smaller scale.
"But the story of Detroit is that it became a majority black city very quickly."
That is or may be just one of the stories of Detroit.
"If it was a city of one million white people, of course you wouldn't have this urban decay, of course there would have been renewal, of course there would have been government intervention to bring in market forces that would benefit the city. But the story of Detroit is that it became a majority black city very quickly."
This implies that blacks are inept at running cities. Typical liberal racism.
And it is absolutely striking when one crosses from Windsor, Ontario to Detroit - immediately the roadsides are totally littered with trash! As a U.S. citizen, I feel a sense of shame every time I see the trashy roadways of Detroit. It's no wonder the Canadians think we are all ill-mannered and wasteful.
They will not deal with that problem and until they do no one is going to move there.
If Bethlehem Steel would sell the lakefront property...and if there aren't any deadly toxins buried on same, Buffalo could revive.
It is a disgusting place right now and sinking fast despite placing lipstick on the sow's lips.
I was curious about that statement too. Was the writer trying to say that whites wouldn't allow their city to deteriorate? Was he saying that whites care more about their communities than blacks? Was he saying that it was the fault of the whites, who, by their leaving, made Detroit fail?
The welfare program bastardization of the blacks in America was a big player in this disaster... What left wing Democrats didn't destroy -- the unions destroyed.
Liberals have once again produced devastating unintended consequences with their "well meaning" liberal bullsquat theology...
The DNC's attempt to secure the black plantation and the black vote -- has destroyed a large percentage of several generations of black families...
Semper Fi
There are a lot of stories to tell about Detroit. Very few of them from the past 50 years are good.
This is a Liberal put down of American Blacks if ever there was one. It shows the true nature of Liberal thinking about blacks as a people.
Just like Johannesberg.
Of course it's not about color but of political philosophy.
If Blacks were predominantly Conservative, their leaders would be proudly pointing to monumental
achievements rather than be constantly crying the racism excuse for their failures.
The liberals' obscene political use of Blacks during the last half of the 20th century is racism on steroids.
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