“Ich bin ein Detroiter”
stills from Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of Detroit
Rick Prelinger collects old film footage from a myriad of sources and crafts elegiac films from the detritus. His recent compilation of found imagery, Lost Landscapes of Detroit, emanates from a love of, rather than a requiem for, the city. The footage, spanning 1917 to 1970, screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). It was subsequently placed online, where I first came across it, at Lost Landscapes of Detroit, as part of the Prelinger Archives. It is a wonderful work of cinema.
excerpt from Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of Detroit
An old, funky service announcement on the technical capabilities of film cameras and the nature of modern cities starts Lost Landscapes. From there it moves to silent footage of a bus in Three Rivers, Michigan (destined for Detroit) and an overhead shot of the city of Detroit from what looks to be the 1940s or ’50s. Lost Landscapes is in essence a beautiful and silent journey through forgotten footage of a city: factories, roads, skylines, homes, neighborhoods, and cars, many, many cars of old vintage. Not landscapes, per se, but the visual essence of a place.
A downtown Detroit parade and cavalcade for Otto Preminger’s 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, filmed in Michigan and based on a notorious case in the state, floats past silently. Hollywood faces and starstruck townsfolk glide by. Detroit mayor Louis Miriani (1957–1961) rides in a car with his wife and beaming film star Lee Remick. Police officers on horseback trot along with an all-white high school marching band strutting funky and graceful. As dusk falls Hollywood searchlight beams light the sky.
A fabulous middle section of Lost Landscapes moved me deeply—flickering film of a barely visible African American church procession at the grand opening of a new “Triumph The Church Kingdom of God In Christ”. The choir is happily dressed in robes in the morning sunlight, mothers of the church in white. Much of the film is so faded and violently flickering as to be barely visible—it is elegiac, spiritual, regal. The pastor, a “Bishop D.H. Harris” gets into his big, fancy car. There’s an all-black marching band, doing their thing. The segment’s coda has an old woman walking alone in a courtyard next to the (old? the new?) church. The film flickers and fades off, these souls and their stories sifting away with it.
Later there is imagery of old hotels, random buildings, theaters, old beer signs, and bus stations on scratch-laden black and white film. Much of the film buckles rhythmically as if blowing in the wind. A 1995 Village Voice article described Prelinger’s archives (then located in New York’s meat-packing district, now in San Francisco, along with the heralded Prelinger Library) as residing in a “climate-controlled cavern filled with pallets and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving groaning under countless film canisters”. Here Prelinger had obsessively collected celluloid flotsam since the 1980s. In 2002 the archives were acquired by the Library of Congress.
An old man shovels winter snow while a dog runs about. A corner sign reads “Mendota & Oakman”. Cars, beautiful cars—Fords, Chryslers. An A&P Super / Market. Fromm’s hardware. Vernor’s Ginger Ale. The Annex Theater. The Riviera. A “hot rod” shop. Neighborhood banks. “Air Planes & Trailer Camp & Other Views At Detroit Michigan”. A De Soto automobile plant. Old footage of cars along 8 Mile road. Black women and a white family sharing a kiddie pool at the beach. Steam railroads from the sixties.
An info reel from the ’50s is titled, “This Is Your Police Department”, with an authoritative Dragnet-like voiceover that features the police cap logo “TUEBOR”— Latin for “I Will Protect” or “defend”. Officers help children cross streets, with a rookie officer “Joe” learning the job—reading car licenses, observing the way criminals “walk” ( a suspect is captured in this way). We view police precinct meetings, radio dispatchers on the job, and proclamations that many police calls are for “family trouble”. It ends with a glorious payroll office armed robbery broken up by Joe and his partner, who is shot and injured. “Joe understood now why [Detroit’s] police were considered bad insurance risks…”
Then a grand coda:
A short documentary with music by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The temper of ideas put forth about the city of Detroit in this eloquent short is so grand and monumental that it made me sorry I didn’t live in Detroit in the ’70s. Voiceover is handled by then mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh (1962-1970):
“The most cosmopolitan city of the Midwest, bustling, standing at the threshold of a bright new future. A spirit of brotherhood, born and nurtured, people from many nations. An exciting new vision. A metropolis of thriving commerce and culture. A resurgence of civic pride and unfettered imagination. Applied skills of planners and idea men. Urban efficiency. A finer Detroit of bold new form.”
All the while the city is sleek and grand, stark, sharp color vistas of Detroit that make it look like a mix between a Mies Van Der Rohe urban utopia and Rome.
“The inner city becoming an exciting place to live, with the most modern schools. A 20th century vision…”
Lost Landscapes of Detroit ends with more silent visions of the city—call them landscapes if we must—downtown vistas, rolling cars, families strolling downtown, themselves taking photographs while being filmed. City architecture, old shops and hotels. A final montage displays city homes up for sale, some with “sold” signs in their yards, in what looks to be the ’60s, or even as early as the ’50s.
Then—the open highway—p.o.v. from a car driving an interstate Michigan highway.
And finally, a slow pan across a fine lawn with words physically scrawled upon it, in a landscape of bushes and shrubbery, that reads—
To quote Lee Rodney in an article on the future of Detroit in a 2009 issue of Fuse magazine, an, of all things, art magazine from Windsor, Ontario:
“…A number of people are looking at Detroit as a challenging and complex urban experiment, one that attempts to chart a different course than the repeat cycles of business development and demolition that have plagued Detroit since the early 20th century.
”
Izida Zorde, editor of Fuse, in the same issue:
“While [Detroit’
s] lack of development and market interest has created devastating living conditions, it has also produced an environment where municipal laws and codes of conduct are opened by default, creating opportunities to shift value-systems away from the market and imagine new equilibriums between the city, social communities and the natural elements.
”
This is to say that perhaps what Lost Landscapes shows us is that Detroit has for over a century possessed a spirit of ingenuity and vitality, as well as a strong sense of community (and may still, despite what doomsayers proclaim). If Detroit no longer possesses this spirit—which is debatable—perhaps like New Orleans, it too can possess spirit once again. Souls, families, and communities develop cities.
Archival footage from Prelinger Archives, San Francisco
Additional footage Timothy Caldwell
Lost Landscapes of Detroit may be freely reused and remixed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License
