Film Review: Deforce

There are few cities that have experienced American history as dramatically as Detroit. During most of the 20^th century, Detroit had a reputation as a model city, and during World War II, as an arsenal of democracy. Through the 1950s, the city’s largely integrated industrial workforce supported a prosperous middle class. At its peak population level in 1950, the city’s median household income was a third higher than the nation’s. With these facts, Deforce begins a heartbreaking history of decline and violence that not only helps explain Detroit’s current crisis, but also deeply challenges our understanding of poverty, urban politics, and especially race.

The decay of present-day Detroit has been well chronicled, and the new documentary film Urban Roots in its first minutes treads familiar ground as it unspools a now-familiar montage of crumbling warehouses and gutted bungalows in the ailing Motor City. But before you can hurl charges of “ruin porn,” the film shifts to its real focus: The gardeners who are turning the vacant lots of Detroit into fields of abundance. Let others focus on what’s dead and dying; this movie is about what’s growing here.

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Leave it to the French to find a strange and poignant beauty in the reeling and degraded remnants of the once-great American nation. This past April, after more than five years of exploration amid the back alleys, ruined halls, pot-holed streets, and emptied factories of the failing Queen of Midwestern Cities, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre released their photographic homage to the place, The Ruins of Detroit. And the results of these two French artists’ prurient and somewhat sordid interest in the fallen city reveals—in much the same way that porn reveals—something about the hidden beliefs, latent habits of thought, and dark submerged impulses that exist in some subterranean place in the heart of our culture. Read more …

Anyone who has poked around Detroit or even just seen the now ubiquitous images of its sprawling desolation is bound to have conflicting reactions. The city is a staggering spectacle, but the question of what exactly it is you’re looking at—or, more precisely, seeing—is something of an ethical and aesthetic litmus test in an age of so many artfully composed portraits of devastation. Detroit’s photographers manage to turn suffering into a still-life. Read more …