It's all too fitting
that Julien Temple's 2010 documentary, 'Requiem For Detroit?', is
being screened at The Arches as part of this year's Glasgow Film
Festival prior to a night hosted by Pressure that features Detroit
Techno legend Carl Craig. It's not just reflecting the two cities'
mutual interest in club culture. Nor does the fact that the event
takes place in the former derelict space beneath Central Station that
became an institution in any way compare with the near apocalyptic
collapse of Detroit's once thriving industrial epicentre depicted by
Temple in his trademark cut n'paste fashion forged in his years
filming the Sex Pistols.
Yet, as other
film-makers have recognised, there are similarities. Detroit's
success was built on the automobile industry, a gas-guzzling
personification of what in his epic verse poet Heathcote Williams
dubbed 'Autogedden', a title later appropriated by eco-primitive pop
star, Julian Cope. Glasgow's fortune was founded on ship-building.
The industrial ebb and
flow that gave both cities their rhythm in turn drove their musical
cultures, from Motown to Techno in Detroit, and from the 1960s
dance-halls to the sort of club nights that fill the Arches today in
Glasgow. Pressure in particular has hosted guests from Detroit,
including Craig, Jeff Mills and a myriad of others.
Yet, with auto
manufacturing crashed and burnt-out in Detroit, and shipbuilding a
rusting hulk in Glasgow, the responses have been starkly different.
Where Glasgow's post-industrial reinvention has been built on a
glossy façade of large-scale cultural events married to high-end
consumerism, Detroit, as Temple's remarkable film shows, is getting
back to its roots and building from the ground up.
The scenes of
devastation in Temple's film look not unlike Britain's abandoned
factories of the 1970s, where Derek Jarman made his own
recession-riven collage, 'The Last of England'. Here too,
'metal-bashing' provocateurs like Test Department used remnants of
the collapsed buildings as instruments, before dance culture created
temporary autonomous zones to go beyond their surroundings towards
something transcendent and utopian.
So it is in Detroit,
where artists are reclaiming abandoned spaces and urban farmers are
getting back to the land as post-capitalist pioneers finding new ways
of being. Closer to home, Requiem For Detroit? has proved to be both
warning and inspiration. As warning, it points to the impending
collapse of capitalism, a notion which until recently would have been
dismissed as the fanciful preserve of pop-eyed Trots. As inspiration,
one need only look to another film made by activists living in
Glasgow.
After watching 'Requiem
For Detroit?', American ex-pat Don MacKeen recognised similarities
between Detroit and Glasgow in terms of social deprivation, falling
populations and staggeringly bad urban planning. MacKeen visited
Detroit, where he filmed the city's thriving urban farming
communities. The result, 'Detroit to Glasgow', is a seventy-minute
study of self-determination and survival on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Meanwhile, while
austerity is preached on the one hand, billions are spent on the
circuses and bread of international sporting events, while, along the
M8, a commerce-driven Babel called Caltongate is being built. As with
Detroit, there can't be many more car crashes left to come. (Neil
Cooper)
Requiem For Detroit? is
screened at The Arches, February 28th, 8pm. Pressure
featuring Carl Craig will follow later the same night and in the same
venue. 'Detroit2Glasgow' can be watched here.
http://www.awayyegrow.org/index.htm
The List, February 2014
ends
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