ヒロシマからデトロイト へ

数年前の映画ですが、今年に入ってようやく見ました。重い映画ってことで敬遠していたんです。外野の我々はジョージ・フロイドの件にしても、ついつい彼も悪いことをしたんではないの？とか色眼鏡を使いがちです。でもこの映画を見ることで警察の理不尽さというものを寒気を感じるまで思い知ることができました。

ヒロシマと何の関係があるのかって？　あのJohn Herseyがこのデトロイトの事件をThe Algiers Motel Incidentという本にまとめているんです。

The Real Events Behind the Movie Detroit, as Described in 1968

BY LILY ROTHMAN 

AUGUST 2, 2017 9:30 AM EDT

When Detroit, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow’s take on that city’s violent summer of 1967, arrives in movie theaters on Friday, 50 years will have passed since the events it depicts took place. Since then, the world’s understanding of the social factors that lead to a race riot — or rebellion, as many see it — has evolved. The stories that began that summer have continued to gain chapters. Yet, as the film notes, some of the details from the eruption in Detroit remain unclear.

It was less than a year after the summer of ’67 when the first major attempt was made to distill the events that make up the film’s centerpiece. The moments in question earned only three sentences in TIME’s original report on the riots, but the writer John Hersey began work almost immediately on what would become the 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident. (You may want to stop reading here if you consider the history a spoiler for the movie.) By the time the book was released around the first anniversary of the riots, the incident in question was well known — it was “something of a local cause célèbre” when Hersey arrived in Detroit about two months after it happened, TIME noted in reviewing the book, and was extensively covered in the local press. But Hersey’s work, and his ability to win the trust of the witnesses he interviewed, won praise for processing a complex and tragic series of events in poignant fashion.

前回の記事で取り上げたNew Yorkerの記事では小説を書いていたHerseyがヒロシマのスタイルに戻ってできた作品としています。（評価はヒロシマほどではないですが。。。）

John Hersey and the Art of Fact

Hersey pioneered a radically new form of journalism. But he grew convinced that his higher calling was fiction, and nobody could persuade him otherwise.

By Nicholas Lemann

April 22, 2019

Reviewers often found his novels fact-stuffed, overexplained, didactic, and lacking in vibrancy and humor. In Treglown’s view, Hersey’s return to form was “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), a work of nonfiction about the 1967 Detroit riots, which Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 film, “Detroit,” drew upon. It demonstrates his astonishing talent for eliciting oral history and forensically reconstructing the experiences of people who have endured a major disaster. But it doesn’t have the pure-gold narrative structure of “Hiroshima.” In effect, Hersey ceded what may be the greatest technical advance in the history of nonfiction to others—as if, like the atomic bomb, it deserved to be renounced immediately after its unveiling.

この映画がでた後に、孫のCannon Herseyさんがデトロイトを訪問しているレポがありました。

Detroit Revealed - My Grandfather John Hersey and America

NHK WORLD PRIME 49m 00s 

Broadcast on October 14, 2017 Available until August 16, 2020

American journalist John Hersey (1914-1993) opened the eyes of much of the world to the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In this program, Cannon Hersey retraces his grandfather's footsteps and considers the domestic climate in the United States since the start of the Trump presidency. In 1967, amidst racial strife, John Hersey wrote that every white person bore some degree of responsibility for violence against African-Americans. Half a century later, racial and religious prejudices are again spawning attacks. The program explores the seeds of hate and what they might grow into.

見れるのは今週いっぱいまでのようなので興味のある方は上記リンクから是非ご覧ください。