In its series 'Sometimes Cities: Urban America Beyond NYC,' New York City's Anthology Film Archives explores the intersection of architecture and people.

Photo courtesy Anthology Film Archives/Julian Temple

Requiem for Detroit? was developed by director Julien Temple to chronicle the “first post-American city.”

When director Chad Friedrichs began work on a documentary about the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, he thought he was making a film about architecture and environmental determinism. But as he did more research, the focus on design “kind of melted away.” Archival footage and contemporary interviews with former residents displaced shots of buildings and commentary from experts.

“Bringing in residents’ voices was something we really, really wanted to do because it was perceived as a voice that was lacking,” Friedrichs says of his film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, released in 2011. “Everything since, say, the 1970s has really focused much less on the actual lived experience at Pruitt-Igoe and much more on the general—how Pruitt-Igoe fits into an architectural story or how it fits into a story about urban design.”

“It’s like Pruitt-Igoe became an idea at a certain point, as opposed to an actual living, breathing community,” he adds.

This conceptual shift expanded the scope of the documentary, made ita surprise hit for Friedrichs and his distributor, First Run Features, and placed it in a small but important group of normally overlooked urban documentaries that preserve the experiences of everyday people in America’s cities. These intimate films rely on ground-level urban narratives more than expert analysis, tend to be populist condemnations of outsized corporate and governmental forces conspiring against the citizenry, and are traditionally relegated to film festivals or fly-by-night screenings, if they’re shown at all. But as the success of Pruitt-Igoe demonstrates, there is a hunger for, or at least a growing interest in, these types of films, driven, perhaps, by the toll prolonged economic stagnation takes on U.S. cities and the public. 

Not coincidentally, Anthology Film Archives in New York is screening a series of these documentaries from June 14-17. “Sometimes Cities: Urban America Beyond NYC” presents five films (including Pruitt-Igoe) that confront the scope and complexity of the forces—economic, political, corporate, social, cultural—that have fueled urban upheaval across the country, not just New York, since the mid-1960s.

“Part of the conception, for me, was trying to counteract a little bit the sense that I have that people in New York don’t really get it as far as what’s happening to cities,” Anthology programmer Jed Rapfogel says. “I think there’s a gulf between people’s experiences of living in a city here versus what’s actually happening elsewhere.”

Like Pruitt-Igoe, the other films featured in the Anthology program eschew the lifeless celebration and sterile dissection of cities by scholars, authors, and other experts in favor of a bottom-up view of the American urban experience that looks beyond major metropolises like New York or Chicago. The films are stark yet exhilarating, denying us the comfort of clinical distance in favor of direct confrontation with the harsh, often disturbing realities facing the people left behind when a city implodes.

Sometimes City, a 2011 film by Tom Jarmusch (brother of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch), takes this approach to experimental levels. Jarmusch, who lived in Cleveland for more than a decade, trains his camera—sometimes standard-definition video, sometimes Super 8 or 16mm—on nearly 50 people in the city and lets them talk. And talk. And talk. Rather than editing their stories into sound bites, Jarmusch stacks one story on top of another to form an uncomfortable, honest cinematic portrait of the people who struggle to resuscitate Cleveland.

“Originally I kind of thought I’d be more playful with the voiceovers and voices over images,” Jarmusch says. “But then, as I was shooting, I just thought, I don’t want to do that at all. I don’t want to cut away from these people. I just want to be with them, watch them, listen to them, and then sort of, if possible, hang out with them.”

Another film from recent years, Requiem for Detroit?, was developed by director Julien Temple (The Filth and the Fury, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle) to chronicle the “first post-American city.” It’s a more conventional documentary, in that Temple balances expert analysis with “real” people. But he upends the dynamic. The experts are all Detroit residents, too, and rather than watch them in an office or a studio we follow them—and the other interviewees—to empty highways, overgrown gas stations, collapsing auto plants, shuttered schools, and abandoned homes. This integrates us into their lives, but more importantly immerses us in a physical space: the remnants of a city destroyed by 30 years of slow-motion economic decimation.

While Requiem and Sometimes City share few aesthetic similarities, they are conceptual siblings. They take an issue that can easily be abstracted when discussed by scholars or sociologists and make it tangible and immediate by focusing on the potent, melancholic recollections of everyday people. “All we usually hear are the experts,” Jarmusch says. “It’s just different hanging out with people who live somewhere.”

By widening the lens on the issues choking American cities, these and the other films in Anthology’s series (and the subgenre from which they originate) restore the voices of people who, for decades, have been ignored. In the process, they recalibrate the conversation about American urbanism.