Music by Michael Nyman
With the participation of Detroit artist Tyree Guyton, French sociologist Loïc Wacquant, Detroit-born writer Dan Georgakas, Detroit photographer Lowell Boileau, and a variety of local residents, the film looks back over the history of the city in the twentieth century: over the rise and fall of the social system identified by social theorists as ‘Fordism’; the way the city was shaped by the automobile; and its decline following the deindustrialisation which began in the 1950s, leaving it ill-adapted to the post-Fordist society of the epoch of globalisation.Much of the story is told through a rich variety of archive footage – of the Ford plants, mass protests of the Depression years, Diego Rivera painting his famous mural ‘Detroit Industry’, the struggle for trade union rights, the riots of 1943 and 1967 – through which the film charts the battle over the image of the city and its industry that began when the Ford Motor Company started making its own films back in 1913.