The documentary “We Are All Detroit – Staying and Disappearing” observes the structural change in the wasteland of once proud automobile factories.
The cities of Bochum and Detroit are an obvious choice for a documentary parallel narrative regarding structural change: here the Opel plant, which has been closed since 2014 and has since been demolished, and there the headquarters of its ungracious mother General Motors. The fact that this mother was once very caring, that she made it possible for people without a higher education to participate in the middle class, sounds like a fairy tale from the past. But the details of General Motors’ bankruptcy and the saving of more than a million jobs through nationalization are not the subject here. Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s documentary “We Are All Detroit” is a journey to the lost production sites and the people who mightn’t imagine their lives without them.
When the ex-Chrysler engineer Greg drives the film team through the former industrial areas of Detroit, the great emptiness still seems surreal to him. Not only are most of the factory buildings gone; only a few of the generous houses of the working-class families are left, like landmarks in nowhere.
That’s how it is with limitless capitalism: once it’s had its breakfast, there aren’t even any decorative leftovers. Where a factory ruin as big as a city district still stands, the former production hall of the Packard luxury sedan, an investor was able to buy it for a piece of cake. Perhaps in two decades a follow-up film will show us a gentrified paradise with green lofts at this point.
“Now there are these hipsters here,” explains Rich, a hardware store owner who is closing his family’s hardware store following a century. By then his city had already brought its great dying behind it: Of the two million people who lived here, 600,000 are still left.
The filmmaker couple Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken specialize in topics related to structural change; they have already documented the farewell to Bochum’s most important employer in “Arbeit Heimat Opel”. In this film, when they accompany a former worker through the vast emptiness of the Bochum factory hall that is regarding to be demolished, he almost bursts into tears. It’s no wonder that the iconic neon lettering was dismantled at night and in fog so as not to attract any attention. But in the morning it still said “Opel”, clearly legible from the dust of the decades. The image that this film preserves has the beauty of an Ed Ruscha painting. “Ruin porn” is what Detroit calls the aesthetic appeal of the broken.
Precarious jobs only
Anyone who appreciates the Ruhr area because of its industrial monuments may understand that they didn’t want another Centennial Hall in Bochum. Now you can see how Armin Laschet opens a DHL logistics center in the same place. They are proud of the 600 precarious jobs where 20,000 people once had decent jobs. In the big picture of the corporate rescue by the US taxpayer, the German subsidiary plays no role. In the US, 1.2 million jobs are said to have been saved for twelve billion that was spent on the bottom line. In Germany, 3.3 billion government guarantees might not prevent the closure.
One is surprised how naturally these two very different cities and their people come together in the slow rhythm of the two-hour film. As luck would have it, another North Rhine-Westphalian metropolis is currently being compared to the city in Michigan. In the “Techno” exhibition in the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast, reference is made to a common musical history.
There is no black music at all in this film, not even the soul forge of Motown Records, which made Detroit a Mecca for African American musicians back in the ’60s. Only Bruce Springsteen can be heard once with a workers’ song. Detroit has probably never been so quiet. Maybe an audio-visual cliché should be avoided here; you don’t have to play Mozart in every film regarding Salzburg (the actual film music was composed by Maciej Sledziecki, a specialist in electronically controlled acoustic instruments with the sound of a solo accordion).
But the absence of this city’s second major industry – the one that survived and is world-renowned – also creates the false impression of a cultural void. But especially when it comes to cultural change in metropolises, one also wants fragments of the cultural identities of their inhabitants.
The impression left by an Afro-American couple is all the stronger. Donney and Roxanne Jones cultivate fallow land as “urban farmers”. Industry has given them the freedom they need to return to subsistence farming. Even in the Ruhr area, one can still well remember what was once harvested in the workers’ gardens, even in the dustiest of air. But that’s a topic for another film.
We Are All Detroit – Staying and Disappearing. Documentary, Germany 2022. Director: Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken. 118 mins
