Julien Temple’s documentary Requiem for Detroit is “a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision.” A “slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims.”  In 75 minutes of narrative, Temple paints a stark picture of a declining city that was once the USA’s 4th largest and the “frontier” of the American dream.

His is a picture of a city at its peak in 1915, but which was hit hard by the Great Depression and never fully recovered, beset by union trouble through the 30′s and then ultimately living at the behest of the massive automotive industries that defined what Detroit has become, ring-fenced by massive industrial decline and troubled by rampant social concerns.  It’s a bleak tapestry weaved, with the city in an undeniable and terminal death spin, and little ability for the powers that be to help bring it under control in the present day and age.  Nowhere is the post-industrial decline and the impact thereof more brutally apparent than it is in Detroit.

Whilst the city is being stripped bare, quite literally by scrappers, from the threads of the history of the city and the strokes of such an awful picture, Temple begins to construct hope.  There’s a realisation that positives can be drawn from the current wretched state.  The rebirth and regeneration of the urban agricultural movement, is one, whilst the arrival of artists, adding to the cultural heritage, puts the place at a new cross-roads.

The documentary draws on incredible footage, from the vintage archival film clips projected onto a decaying cityscape, to modern shots that speak for themselves: drive-by footage of burned out shells for houses, crumbling tower blocks sprouting organics, and deserted office spaces, left at a moment in time, as if someone had called up and told everyone to drop what they were doing and leave town immediately.  It’s an incredible sight.

From a peak of 2 million inhabitants the city now sits as home to some 800,000 people, a complex network of neighbourhood islands that outline huge disparities between social stratum, still markedly split down racial lines, the city seems unable to pick itself up with a saturation of poverty, unemployment and huge business that has sucked the life blood out of the city and is incapable of understanding its social responsibility.

It’s a harrowing story, vividly told, and, as Temple states, like taking a time machine 1000 years into the future: a decaying wasteland and urban explorer’s paradise.  It makes you wonder where Detroit will be in 50 years.  Not even the likes of Martha Reeves, famed Motown singer and present council woman, nor Mitch Ryder, the high-octane strummer can seemingly rescue the heart and soul of the city, but they are trying damned hard, that’s for sure.

Julien Temple is a well-known film maker, starting out his ‘career’ shooting the Sex Pistols and more recently conjuring up documentaries about Joe Strummer and the Oil City.  From his article for the Guardian Detroit: the last days he opens the narrative with a clear and simple take:

Leaving behind the gift shops of the “Big Three” car manufacturers, the Motown merchandise and the bizarre ejaculating fountains of the now-notorious international airport, things become stranger and stranger.

Having run the gamut of social documentaries about Detroit before, including BBC 4′s Motor City’s Burning, I didn’t necessarily learn anything new from the history that is told, but it certainly brought my understanding and knowledge up-to-date.

I think we are all ofay with the past, but no one really knows the Detroit of the present.  It might be ‘glamourised’ by the lyrics of the Eminem, Iggy Pop, Kiss and others, but Temple takes the torch to it and strips everything back, and thank god he does.  Whether this will make a difference, who knows, but at least the rest of the US can no longer morally turn a blind eye.

Moreover, what does this tell us about the rest of the post-industrial age? Where are we all heading?  Does Detroit represent a unique case or is the same fate going to befall all of us.  I do wonder if the same socio-political and economic woes will beset other post-industrial economies.  It’s a stark warning to the rest of us for sure.