We think of films as being about people, but very often they are also about cities. Whether as a ubiquitous backdrop to the action that quietly emerges as a character in its own right (like the archetypal Los Angeles or New York of Hollywood features), or thrust into the foreground itself as a mirror of human nature (as in a Blade Runner or Metropolis), cities have been integral to cinema and film as a powerful way of revealing the city. These two modes of representing cities are amongst the themes explored by the Architecture Foundation’s on-going event series, Architecture on Film, held bi-monthly at the Barbican. This week it featured the new film Detroit Wild City by Paris-based director Florent Tillon. Tillon’s previous work includes a series of documentaries exploring dimensions of the urban experience. As he explained, he sees the documentary as a way to foreground the city without the need to subordinate it to a fictional plot: for Tillon, “the city is the main character”. And Detroit, Michigan, is quite a character.

We were offered a glimpse of Detroit's past promise in Detroit: City on the Move, a 1965 promotional video shown alongside Tillon's film at the screening which showcased the then bustling city as the shining pinnacle of industrial modernity. Fifty years later, it had all gone wrong. The industrial investment that underpinned the city’s prosperity proved fickle and moved elsewhere, condemning Detroit to economic stagnation. Just as importantly, the mechanistic conception of society on which the city grew masked deep structural and racial inequalities. Two years after City on the Move was made, Detroit was wracked by some of the country’s worst-ever race riots, and over subsequent decades the middle classes almost completely fled the city. As Tillon sees it, Detroit’s decline went hand-in-hand with its transformation into a ‘Robocop city’ (Robocop was set in a future Detroit): a carceral place where fear drove citizens into hiding in private space and the original city became an abandoned battleground.

Tillon is quick to emphasize that “capturing the whole truth of a city on film is impossible”; when examining this “most complex of human creations”, all we can hope to do is provide one window onto a bigger picture. Hence, Wild City consciously takes a particular stance toward the evolution of Detroit. The story it tells is one of poetic destruction, highlighting through the visual power of cinema the paradoxic beauty of the depopulated city’s empty streets and decaying ruins. It is an image given poignancy by the way it materialises popular imagination of a “post-human, post-apocalyptic world”. The flipside of this, however, is the city’s gradual re-occupation – at first by the insects, animals and plants which reoccupy urban spaces, and then by a series of urban ‘pioneers’ who find in the city a space to build a new, self-sufficient way of life outside the materialism of mainstream capitalism. “This”, says Tillon, “is a beautiful story: people who are growing a new way of life, a new way of enjoying the city, making something among the ruins.”

As Detroit Free Press reporter John Gallagher points out, however, the film’s narrative of ruin and reincarnation is just one of a number of realities which coexist in the city. There is, as Tillon acknowledges, Detroit’s majority poor and black population, for whom the depressed centre seems to represent anything but the promise of a better life. Then there are continuities from the city’s old prosperity – neighbourhoods, factories and cultural institutions that still thrive, and even the possibility of a future rehabilitation of Detroit’s industrial base. In addition, there is a different kind of re-occupation, consisting mostly of the young, creative people or entrepreneurs who spot opportunities in alternative ways of revitalising the metropolis. One of the film’s interviewees sees the latter – the ‘settlers’ - as the true future of the city rather than the self-reliant but ultimately marginal ‘pioneers’. He argues that “you can’t build a whole city on a subsistence model”. The film met some negative reception in Detroit for ignoring this apparently more positive aspect: why was this left out?

Tillon argues that this was not the story he wanted to convey: “I filmed people who had ideas, who were certain about the future of the city, but in the end I did not put it in. It was wonderful, it was great, but it was not good film”. Their confident explanations were “not poetic” enough compared to the uncertain efforts of the city’s communal pioneers. But there was also more than this, he says – the ‘pioneers’, whatever the long-term viability of their efforts, represent a rare attempt at carving a truly different mode of life in the middle of a major American city. “These people are just self-sufficient, they want to make zero dollars, to just live. Another group wants to increase, to recreate capitalism … to surf on the wave [of the colonizers]”, he explains. Detroit is thus not a homogenous city but a contested space where different groups battle over different meanings of the city and life within it.

It’s this recognition that highlights the true strength of Detroit Wild City. It is not so much a film about the future of Detroit. Rather, it is about how Detroit is, “paradoxically, always the city of the future”, a “nerve ending of the 20th century”, where the failed visions of the past and the possibility of alternative tomorrows are simultaneously visible. The Detroit portrayed in Wild City thus acts within a narrative of universal themes – the failures of modernity, the simultaneous fear and attraction of apocalypse, and the possibility of a better world. This is what gives it resonance far beyond Detroit or similar cities. Is it not such a resonance that film (whether about characters or about a city) should strive to achieve? As a friend of Tillon’s told him: “you haven’t made a film about the city. But you have made a film about life”.