A Public Television documentary about post-riot Detroit that has not been seen in 45 years plays tonight at 7 p.m. at the Detroit Film Theatre inside the Detroit Institute of Arts. It's a selection in the Freep Film Festival, which runs through Sunday at the DFT.
Filmmaker Gary Gilson told John Monaghan he had no preconceptions when he visited Detroit in 1968 to make a documentary about the city’s unemployment and racial problems for Public Television. He and his crew shot an estimated 20 hours of footage.
“Networks like CBS and ABC would come in with things scripted, knowing what they wanted to shoot. But in Public Television we had a lot more freedom,” he says. “We had a rough outline, but we left our nerve endings open for what we might find.”
The film was was praised at the time, especially by Detroit’s black community, for being an honest, fly-on-the-wall depiction of the city and its residents in the wake of the 1967 riots.
Detroit was more than twice as populous in 1968 as now, and while it had been losing population for more than a decade, the flight of white residents and businesses was surging in the months after five days of insurrection had left 43 dead and sections of the city in ruins.
Yet even with the passage of nearly a half century, people who have screened the film say some of the themes appear timeless.
Kathy Kieliszewski, one of the festival’s organizers, said: “With its story of unemployment, the auto companies, and the work force, the movie feels as relevant now as when it was made,” she says.
Gilson shot in Detroit with a cameraman and sound man from October 1968 to February 1969. The gist of the assignment was to capture job-training programs sponsored by the Big Three automakers that were supposed to get unemployed, mostly African-American men to work in a factory.
One of the most telling scenes shows African-American leaders like Congressman John Conyers in a frank — and sometimes heated — discussion with white community members about race. Representatives of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) speak passionately about revolt against the primarily white factory foremen.
Less incendiary images are also shown, including an in-studio visit with radio personality Martha Jean (the Queen) Steinberg and footage of bar patrons watching the Detroit Tigers’ 1968 World Series win.
