GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
Serving both as a warning and inspiration, Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit? documents how a thriving city can be brought to its knees. Neil Cooper wonders if we will ever learn
I t’s all too i tting that Requiem for Detroit? is being screened at The Arches during the Glasgow Film Festival. Later on that same evening, a club night is hosted there by Pressure featuring Detroit techno legend Carl Craig, rel ecting the two cities’ mutual interest in club culture. While this takes place in a once-derelict space beneath Central Station that has since become a Glasgow institution, this in no way compares with the near apocalyptic collapse of Detroit’s once thriving industrial epicentre. That economic and social catastrophe is depicted via Temple’s trademark cut and paste fashion which he forged while i lming the Sex Pistols.
Yet, as other i lmmakers have recognised, there are clear similarities. Detroit’s success was built on the automobile industry, a gas-guzzling personii cation dubbed ‘Autogeddon’ by poet Heathcote Williams. Glasgow’s fortune was founded on shipbuilding. The industrial ebb and l ow that gave both cities their rhythm in turn drove their musical cultures, from Motown to techno in Detroit, and from 1960s dance halls to the techno / electro club nights that i ll The Arches today in Glasgow. Pressure in particular has hosted guests from Detroit, including Carl Craig, Jeff Mills and a myriad of others. But, 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, Detroit (as Temple’s remarkable i lm shows) is getting back to its roots and building from the ground up.
too, ‘metal-bashing’ provocateurs The scenes of devastation in Temple’s i lm look not unlike Britain’s abandoned factories of the 1970s, where Derek Jarman made his own recession-riven collage, The Last of England. Here like Test Department used remnants of the collapsed buildings as instruments, before dance culture created temporary autonomous zones to go beyond their surroundings and 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 i nding new ways of being. Closer to home, Requiem for Detroit? has proved to be both a warning and inspiration. As a 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.
A s
one inspiration, need only look to another i lm made by activists living in Glasgow. After watching Temple’s doc, 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 i lmed the city’s thriving urban farming communities. The result, Glasgow2Detroit, is a 70-minute study of self-determination and survival on both sides of the Atlantic.
So, as 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 we’ve seen with Detroit, there can’t be many more car crashes left to come.
Requiem for Detroit? and Pressure are at The Arches, Glasgow, Fri 28 Feb. Glasgow2Detroit can be watched at awayyegrow.org/index.htm
FIVE OF THE BEST . . . MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS OF THE GFF Words Claire Sawers
PARTIR TO LIVE Strobes, 12-string guitar drones, skin-on-skin shots, electricity pylons – expect a chilling, confusing hour or so, at this screening of Chilean i lm Partir to Live. It’s beautifully soundtracked by the Dutch minimalist electronic composer, Jozef Van Wissem, who won a Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his work with cult director Jim Jarmusch on Only Lovers Left Alive. ■ CCA, Glasgow, Fri 21 Feb.
MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS Before playing the Usher Hall in July, lachrymose Brooklyn rockers, the National, appear in this tour documentary i lmed by lead singer Matt’s brother, Tom Tom Berninger. ■ Paisley Arts Centre, Sat 22 Feb; The Glad Café, Glasgow, Tue 25 Feb.
METALHEAD A grieving teenager gets over her brother’s s death by shutting out
14 THE LIST 20 Feb–20 Mar 2014
the real world and burying herself in the heavy metal he used to love. Expect Kiss make-up, coming-of- age drama, and spectacular Icelandic scenery. ■ GFT, Glasgow, Wed 26 & Thu 27 Feb. Thu 27 Feb. 7
GOBLIN / GOLDEN TEACHER The Italian specialists in terrifying synth-horror soundtracks, Goblin, return to the GFF. Their scores to 1970s and 80s giallo i lms, notably Dario Argento’s Profondo Da Rosso and Suspirio helped Ro cement their cult status. ce For that, they have Pink Fo Floyd to thank, after they Flo turned down Argento’s tur offer to write the score. In off addition, there will be the ad pummelling, polyrhythmic pu beats of Golden Teacher. be See preview, page 67. Se
■ Oran Mor, Glasgow, Thu 27 Feb.
THE PUNK SINGER Kathleen Hanna – Portland’s feminist activist, zine writer, lead singer in Le Tigre, Bikini Kill and the Julie Ruin – gets the documentary once-over in this inspiring look at her two-i nger salute to all things patriarchal. The screening is introduced by Lauren Mayberry of TYCI and Chvrches. ■ GFT, Glasgow, Fri 28 Feb. See glasgowi lm.org/ festival for more info.