All America: Cars and Baseball. A Review of Foreign Parts by Vrna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki. 2010. 80 min.

Olatz Gonzlez Abrisketa University of Basque Country Avenida de Tolosa, 70 20018 Donostia-San Sebastin (Spain) olatz.gonzalez@ehu.es; olatz26@gmail.com Foreign Parts is one of the best documents of what makes North America. Where the car is the attribute that defines the North American middle class, where its the asset that best shows whether you are in or out of play, Vrna Paravel and J.D. Sniadecki get inside the New York neighborhood Willets Point, a huge area of car supplies. The neighborhood of Queens is part of an urban renewal plan that will relegate into oblivion this community that is struggling between the solidarity of suffering and the violence of abandonment. Huge puddles cross the path of those who walk the neighborhood: the destitute, the homeless, hopeless idealists, preachers and anthropologists. But they also facilitate the work of those who try to capture the cars that come in search of exchange, and whose velocity barely surpasses 10 kilometers per hour. This allows the streets of Willets Point to host barbecues, card games, dances, gatherings and all kinds of improvised convocation, reflected in the stainless metal of the hubcaps, fenders and other car fixtures. It is for this reason that Foreign Parts, besides being a radically original film, has the best of classic anthropology: it offers a full inventory of the material culture of a community that is on the verge of disappearance. But, like in any great movie, the best parts are the human stories, stories whose greatness is possible because the directors are willing to yield to them; they follow them with the curiosity of a naturalist, and offer the spectator a dance with them. They are absolutely foreign lives that, despite the harshness of the situation, deserve to be lived. During the 80 minutes of Foreign Parts, the spectator is always inside and convinced, as Geertz would have it, of penetrating a different form of life. Vrna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki persuade us that they were really there not only for the formality of their methods, but also for some exceptional cinematographic decisions. Dancing with Julia is an aesthetic experience, absolutely beautiful and deeply transformative. If this is one of the most memorable moments of the filmas there are several, there is in my view a shot, if only a single one in 80 minutes, which fails. It is a high-angle shot of the street in Willets Point, full of puddles, with the American flag flying in the foreground. This is the only moment where the directors, whose presence is obvious all through the documentary (the characters address them constantly, some of them carry their tripod and they can be seen a few times), impose their meaning on the event, creating a few-second long discourse that is as sterile as unnecessary, given that it appears implicit in the course of events as much as in the place itself. The Willets Point community pulsates under the shadow of the giant, the Mets Stadium of New York, another symbol that well defines the North American imagery and which offers expressive metaphors for the United States ideology: three strikes you are out. What happens is that the majority of the Willets Point residents look like they never even had the chance to swing the bat. The great paradox of the film emerges when Sara, who defines herself as the only white woman who lives in Willets Point, wants to pick up her partner, Luis, with whom she

lives in an abandoned truck and who just got out of jail. At a neighborhood that abounds in vehicles, Sara cant find a way to move around and pick Luis up. The camera accompanies Saras unease, and the spectator asks herself: But why, they dont have a car? As Vrna Paravel and J.D. Sniadecki related at the discussion after the showing of the film in the festival Punto de Vista (Point of View), where it won the Best Film Award, they went to Willets Point by bus. They didnt have a car. Someone in the crowd asked them: if they had had a car, would they have used it? They had no doubt about the answer. Of course, they responded in unison. The unreal dream of being there as if one wasnt there is no longer tenable. There is now no doubt about the involvement that fieldwork implies. The anthropologist becomes part of that universe, of that landscape, she is just another foreign part of the group studied; it is there where she mostly belongs and, as this movie makes it clear, with the most marginal characters. The anthropologist walks with them for a while, although the mud does not get to destroy her, really. Foreign Parts is an exceptional film that leaves no doubt about the potential of the ethnographic method which, stripped of all social discourse, is a bonanza for cinema.