Documentary film by Andreï Schtakleff, Detroiters talk regarding those who turned the economic miracle that has now completely collapsed. Blacks especially, since they are the ones who have been put on the car assembly lines. This terrible observation openly takes sides, and this may be its weakness. But the images are powerful and the documents fascinating.
By Bernard Cassat
A filmed document is inserted in the film, the intervention in front of an audience that we do not see, of an unnamed man but certainly a leader, banker or industrialist, who declares that no, the Detroit disaster does not exist, that he visited magnificent streets and that we stop denigrating this city. Andreï Schtakleff, he films the other vision live, African-Americans who say the complete opposite. The Simmons, for example, an elderly black couple, wear a hat on her long braids tied with the red hammer and sickle pin. And tells the story, his story of the city since the Viet Nam war, since the end of the 60s. Opposite speeches therefore, but the side chosen by the director is clear. “I am on their side. It should not be hidden that there are clearly camps on these questions; that’s why I didn’t meet the city’s political leaders to question them or film them. »
Religion and music
Indeed. Long sequences, especially at the beginning, show an urban abandonment worthy of Chernobyl. Another country, another collapse, but the same abandonment. This is also Schtakleff’s line of work. After Exile and the Kingdom, a kind of reflection on the miseries of the world, The Magic Mountain had shown the atrocities of the silver mines in Potosi in Bolivia. This third documentary enters the series, it is really on the catastrophist side. But it conceals a force of interesting images. Filmed always in winter, with snow and cold, we even wonder, we Westerners from the old continent, if we are in town. The streets seem in the middle of wasteland, nothing is maintained, a house collapses next to another can still be inhabited. The facts are said, the shenanigans of the banks who buy back houses at ridiculous prices to resell them to blacks and thus downgrade entire neighborhoods in order to be able to speculate. And then everywhere, in its history as in its present, the incredible place of the black community.
A former employee of Ford explains how the firm was going to seek itself, in the states of the South, a black work force. She was paid less than white workers, and especially the unions refused blacks (and women!). So in case of conflicts, they became strikebreakers. These employer practices caused a huge black community to settle in Detroit. With all its organizations. Religious first: the black churches were powerful, especially the one where Malcolm X came to give a memorable speech. Schtakleff meets the young pastor who takes over this church and who begins (he says it himself) to preach in front of the camera so much his enthusiasm is deep. And then the music. The famous Motown, the Motor Town, which gave black artists sudden visibility and allowed the emergence of stars like Aretha Franklin, who lived in Detroit all her life. An early clip, shot along Ford assembly lines, has three black singers dancing and singing between passing car doors.
This city was therefore also a center of the struggle for civil rights. With filmed documents, Schtakleff shows some past actions. And captures all the difficulties of black people even today. Two young workers in a canteen talk at length regarding their condition, regarding their misfortune at being born black. We are no longer really in Detroit, but everywhere in the USA, and it is hard to tell ourselves that the situation is so catastrophic. And the film becomes for an important part a document on the black condition.
The images of the abandoned Ford, these huge dilapidated buildings which will soon collapse, bring us back to the subject. Lead to disaster, therefore. We would have liked a more complete description of this city which has become symbolic of the change of era. But precisely, America through Detroit confirms that a page has been turned. Schtakleff however gives no clue on the next page, of the new face that is bound to emerge.
Detroiters
Script, director: Andreï Schtakleff
Director of photography: Romain Le Bonniec
Editor: Marie Loustalot