Introduction
This essay discusses
Foreign Parts (Véréna Paravel and
J.P. Sniadecki, 2010) and its relation to architecture, society and cinema. Foreign Parts is a documentary on an automobile
junkyard and its inhabitants. The film is important for historical reasons as
it documents the Willets Point neighborhood before legislation was passed by
the City of New York that planned to tear it down for redevelopment purposes.
The filmmakers Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki give integrity to its residents
by allowing them to speak for themselves and by presenting them in their lived
immediacy. The avant-garde approach to the documentary owes to the unique methods
of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab.
This essay
will argue that the emphasis in Foreign Parts
on oppressed peoples offers a harsh critique of American Neoliberalism that outcasts
these citizens in the name of urbanization and gentrification. Furthermore, the
essay will explore the ideas of the Marxist geographer David Harvey and the
urban development theorist Jane Jacobs. Their theoretical concepts of the body
politic and of healthy communities will provide a unique perspective onto Foreign Parts.
Finally, this
essay will conclude by arguing that Foreign
Parts, through its content, form, and theoretical implications, provides a
radical critique of neoliberalism that offers itself as a site of resistance
and empathy.
Foreign Parts:
Close Analysis
Foreign Parts begins with a truck being
torn apart: it is brought up into the air by machinery, its motor is taken out,
yellow fluids drip from it, pieces are hanging off, its gas tank is removed, and
its windows are broken. The setting is an automobile junkyard where damaged
vehicles are torn for their usable parts, which are then categorized and then
later sold. The rest of the car is scrapped. There are some cars that arrive to
the junkyard to be taken apart while others are there to be repaired. These
foreign parts and this labor are what make the 39th Avenue, Willets
Point in the Queens borough of New York so unique.
Willets Point
is like a wasteland. There are no sidewalks but instead just dirt and
crater-sized puddles. The neighborhood is next to an inlet of Flushing Bay and when
it rains there is mass flooding since it does not have a proper sewage system. The
neighborhood gets really dirty. Foreign
Parts takes place in the streets, cars, junkyard, auto-repair shops,
offices and restaurants of Willets Point. The architecture of the over two
hundred buildings is old, industrial and decaying. The storefronts are short
and are made of brick. There are protective steel railings that secure the shop
doors. The stores look different from each other, as some are a drab gray while
others are colorfully painted. There are graffiti-designed store displays, regular
business signs and large corporate billboards. The scenes of people opening up
their stores and just hanging out, waiting for some business as they listen to
music are reminiscent of the relaxed atmosphere of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989).
The class disparities
are evident in Willets Point. A journalist who is doing a report on the
neighborhood brings up how its richer surrounding communities can afford to go
to the LaGuardia Community College while the residents of Willets Point cannot.
The people in the neighborhood do not have many options for a prosperous future.
The shop employees include a high number of uncertified and immigrant workers –
the type of people that cannot get work anywhere else – and the businesses are
passed down from one generation to the next. If these residents are to be displaced
there is a high likelihood that they would only be worst off. These bleak
social realities are in contrast to the rich visitors who go see games at the
neighboring Mets Citi Field ballpark.
One of the
subjects of Foreign Parts is labor.
This includes paperwork and smaller trades like selling merchandise and
mechanical responsibilities all the way to auto repair and the use of heavy
equipment in the junkyard. The junkyard is not strictly regulated so with these
tasks there comes some health concerns.
But there are
larger issues surrounding labor and class and race and gender that are called
into question by how they are represented in Foreign Parts. There is an older woman that walks around and begs.
There is a young African-American man that works at a garage. There is Mexican
cook at a restaurant. There is a young group of Jewish-Americans that pray to
help their business. There are also the politicians who have meetings and write
policy. The lone legal resident of the junkyard, the eighty-year-old Joseph
Ardizzone, spends his time protesting the Willets Point redevelopment project. Foreign Parts even ends with the last
line of dialogue on the audio track with a resident accusing the New York mayor
Michael Bloomberg of being “a traitor to the American Dream.” These are just
some realities that are presented in Foreign
Parts and through their directness and by contrast it is up to the viewer
to decide their meaning.
There is also
the labor of the filmmakers who follow the residents at length. Foreign Parts was filmed on and off between
2007 and 2009. Willets Point is a rough and unwelcoming neighborhood. Police do
not even go there at night. (Paravel speaks of getting Sniadecki to help her
with this project for security reasons). There are some moments where the filmmakers
are even seen carrying their recording devices as they make their way through
Willets Point.
Film Form: Sensory
Ethnography Lab
The
particular filming style of Foreign Parts
is unique with its long silent observatory scenes of people performing
tasks. This style allows the filmmakers to bring the viewer directly into the
actions and lived experiences of the Willets Point residents. This
unconventional approach to the documentary, which prefers experimental observation
to standard talking-head interviews, is part of an emerging trend in documentaries
that is coming out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Lucien Castaing-Taylor
oversees the department, who with his fellow professor and co-director Ilisa
Barbash even wrote a book on the subject, Cross-Cultural
Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos.
The breakout film of Castaing-Taylor and Barbash, Sweetgrass (2009), which is about the dying profession of sheep
herding in Montana, can almost be seen as a manifesto or template film for this
emerging school of filmmaking. This group includes Paravel, Sniadecki and also the
sound recording and editing specialist Ernst Karel. The Sensory Ethnography Lab
is a graduate facility and because of this more recently its students and their
films have also begun to appear at film festivals with the most recent addition
being Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez with their documentary MANAKAMANA (2013), which is about a
variety of passengers that go up-and-down a chair lift in India.
The approach
of the Sensory Ethnography Lab combines a mixture of visual anthropology with
the ethnographic film. The lab’s stated mandate is to foster “creative work and
research that is constitutively visual or acoustic—conducted through
audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems.”
It is this emphasis on creating these
non-verbal, purely visual and sensorial experiences that make these
documentaries stand out so much.
It is
interesting to bring up Paravel’s background in philosophy and her studies
under Bruno Latour to discuss
Foreign
Parts. The French philosopher building on the ideas of Alfred North
Whitehead and William James proposed a new form of Radical Empiricism. To say
it simply: How do we know what we know? Paravel’s camera in its close
inspection tries to take into account the basic elements of sensory data. It is
almost like the camera in
Foreign Parts
has its own consciousness as it tries to take in all of the small details that
make up Willets Point. This kind of cinematography does not try to make sense
of all the visual information but instead tries to capture the objects and
space in their immediacy. In
Foreign Parts
when the car parts are the subject of close-up shots as something is happening
to them it is as if the camera is searching for the object’s
mode of existence. It is through this
attention to the phenomenology of objects where
Foreign Parts becomes more than just aesthetic in its presentation
but metaphysical in its inquiry. Objects are shown to have a multiplicity of
uses and relations.
In his new
book
American Ethnographic Film and
Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn, Scott MacDonald devotes a chapter
to the Sensory Ethnography Lab where in it he argues for the emerging
importance of its innovations. For MacDonald, the lab is important in its
continuation of a particular experimental Cambridge-based documentary tradition
by its combination of innovation in aesthetics and ethnography. These films are
unique in their ability to render
sensory
experience that can only be captured by way of cinema and its images and
sound design, which differentiates it from the written format. For MacDonald
this is important because, “These films exemplify the commitment of the SEL to
a sense of culture as continuous transformation, interpenetration, and
imbrication.”
This form of
representation can be problematic, as sometimes the subjects are not allowed to
wholly communicate their realities. At times Foreign Parts can give the impression of being insensitive to the
plight of the residents, as it seems more interested in the activities of the
neighborhood’s machines. There are other examples of how the Sensory
Ethnography Lab films disregard the personal for the social. Paravel’s earlier
project 7 Queens (2008) has her walking
through some of the neighborhoods along the Number 7 subway line in order to
experience the myriad of ethnic communities that are serviced by the line. But
through this mobile cinéma vérité
perspective the local residents who are subject to complex social realities and
unique personal histories become reduced to mere visual signs.
But
Foreign Parts, more so than any of these
other Sensory Ethnography Lab films, does not fall into this trap as it emphasizes
the ethnic diversity and social realities of Willets Point. It does so by allowing
for more direct access to its subjects with several interviews. It is this
direct contact with its subjects that is lacking in the more visually radical
next film by Paravel and Castaing-Taylor
Leviathan
(2012) about a fishing barge. For example in
Foreign Parts there is the couple Luis and Sara who become the
structural arc of the film, there is the elderly beggar woman Julia who is the
recipient of the community’s charity, a young man who shows off his expensive
basketball shoes, its Jewish residents who pray in one scene, and there are
many other resident workers, their families and pets.
The attention in Foreign Parts to the small details and their symbolic meaning connects
it to a larger documentary tradition. An interesting interpretation of Foreign Parts is that the junkyard is a
metaphor for the process of filmmaking. MacDonald writes,
Paravel and
Sniadecki “take Willets Point apart”—recording images that represent one or
another dimension of the place and warehousing the results—then, during the
editing process, they put the usable parts together into a piece they hope can move
those who see the results.
Its structure
and editing is reminiscent of the
cinéma
vérité observatory documentaries of Allan King and Frederick Wiseman. For
example, since Willets Point is near LaGuardia Airport there is the reoccurring
motif of a plane flying overhead. This small image can represent many things.
Like the fast-pace of the international world around them, a dream for the
Willets Point residents of escaping to where things would be easier, and it
could be seen as a film-reference to the airplane scene in James Benning’s
Los (2001).
As well the social diversity of
Foreign
Parts is reminiscent of Chris Marker and in particular to
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1968),
which delves beyond generalizations and showed the real diversity of the
Vietnam protesters.
Social Realities
The New York Times ran a feature article on
Willets Point, “The End of Willets Point” by Sarah Maslin Nir in the November 22nd,
2013 issue. Nir highlights some of the local characters that make up its
community as well as some of the benefits and drawbacks of the current state of
the borough before the city starts to overhaul it with its three-phase $3
billion plan. The new plan will force its current residents and businesses to
vacate so that the Willets Point Development and New York City’s Economic
Development Corp. can build new apartment buildings, schools, a retail area and
a park. The particular area of Willets Point in question is the space across
from the Citi Field ballpark from 127th to 35th street. What
the current residents like about Willets Point is its strong sense of
community, a pride in their heritage, and their quality time spent together where
they have fun (even though, for example, the playground is made from hobbled
cars).
The Willets
Point neighborhood consists of workers that are supporting themselves and their
families and with this imminent migration most of them would likely have
nowhere else to go. For example, there is Flaco whose job is to entice drivers
to enter Willets Point for cheap and quick repairs. Also, there is the young
woman Rosa who supports her family by selling food from her minivan. But the
community is not perfect and there are still some problems like lower standards
of living, strenuous weather conditions–the summers get too hot, and the winter
is too cold–there are serious drug addictions, theft, crime, and for those that
do not even have a car to sleep in there is homelessness. The development
planners and the government will apparently pay up to a year of the residents’
future rent and are planning to build ‘affordable housing’ in the neighborhood.
But nothing is really happening, at least not quickly enough. Since Willets
Point official dislocation there have still been coalitions of business owners
that have stayed and are defending their property rights with a poor success
rate.
Neoliberalism and
the Body Politic
This prioritization
of wealth to the disregard of the lower class is just an effect of neoliberalism.
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
David Harvey provides a micro-history
of the political-economic developments of neoliberalism, which he defines as,
The first
instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human
well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade.
For Harvey, it
is the years 1978-80 that are the revolutionary turning point in the world’s
social and economic history. In the year 1978, Deng Xiaoping took steps towards
the liberalization of the communist-ruled Chinese economy. In 1979 Paul
Volcker, from the US Federal Reserve, changed its monetary policy and in 1980
Ronald Reagan became the American president. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was
elected the Prime Minister of Britain. For Harvey these events of the growing ideologically
conservative influence are the major steps towards neoliberalism, which favors
a deregulated market with less government intervention and social planning.
The problem
with neoliberalism is that it has become so omnipresent that it has become an
uncontested and hegemonic discourse. It is now an Ideological State Apparatus,
to use Louis Althusser’s term. Harvey writes, “It has pervasive effects on ways
of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense
way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.”
It is not innocent, either. Harvey writes,
The process of
neolibralization has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only
of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional
forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labor, social relations,
welfare provisions, technological mixed, ways of life and thought, reproductive
activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart.
Willets Point
is just one example of the negative effects of neoliberalism and how it affects
the regular, disadvantaged populace. In his article “The City as a Body Politic,”
Harvey examines the city as an urban space and looks at it from the prism of
‘body politics’.
This is a useful concept to examine the condition of a city especially in
regards to what Harvey defines as ‘wounded cities,’ which are cities that can
be physically or economically damaged. The bleak social realities on view in
Willets Point align it more towards being a wound.
Harvey describes cities in their capitalistic
form as hyperactive sites of “creative destruction,” that go hand-in-hand with
incessant capital accumulation. Cities are both a vulnerable and resilient form
of human organization. They can easily be damaged just as they can quickly
recover from these damages. Just like how the body can be wounded by natural
causes or by physical damage they can (sometimes) also be cured. The two
different forms of strikes against a city that Harvey highlights are natural
disasters, which include earthquakes and tsunamis (e.g. Hurricane Katrina), and
strikes directed by human agency, which includes wars and environmental
accidents (e.g. Irak, Kiev). But there are also economic strikes against the
city created by a history of capitalism, a growing neoliberalism, and its
governmental planning that disadvantages the poor.
Jane Jacobs and
Urban Redevelopment
The concept
of neoliberalism and the wounded city can be connected to Jane Jacobs’ theories
of urbanization. Jacobs is famous for her book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities in which she discusses
the peculiar nature of cities, the conditions for city diversity, forces of
decline and regeneration, and different tactics to address these problems. It
is the sense of community and the relationships between the people that form
there that for Jacobs is the most important. The urban downtown should be an integrated
community for it to be safe and to improve its standard of living.
One example
that puts Jacobs’ ideas into practice is her clash with the New York City mayor
Robert Moses in the 50s and 60s. Moses wanted to redevelop Manhattan by
building highways for easier automobile transit and to do this Moses wanted to
tear down major neighborhoods in Manhattan, which included Greenwich Village and
Washington Square. Jacobs, however, posited that the infrastructure would harm
the local neighborhood’s sense of community, which in reality was thriving. Jacobs
became an activist for this cause and rallied public support that was able to
prevent the redevelopment and would eventual lead to a landmark preservation
bill a few years later.
Jacobs
attacked the orthodoxy of the city planning of the times. Her voice of protest was
one among the many of the period that is known for its radical spirit. The
problem was not that these residential neighborhoods were poor and
crime-filled, Jacobs argues, but that they were just broadly characterized as
such, with a disregard to their actual living conditions, which Jacobs posited
was very safe and friendly. Jacobs emphasized that the life of a city is in its
strong communities and that they should not just be pushed outwards to the
suburbs. This idea was in opposition to Moses who wanted to increase automobile
traffic, which would only become a bigger problem as time would pass. Jacobs
writes about the problems with this automobile-oriented form of city planning,
Automobiles
are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible the ills of cities
and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive
effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence
at city building. Of course planners, including the highwaymen with fabulous
sums of money and enormous powers at their disposal, are at a loss to make
automobiles and cities compatible with one another. They do not know what to do
with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable
and vital cities anyhow – with or without automobiles.
Jacobs principal argument is
that cities need, “a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that
give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially.”
There needs to be a city planning theory that accounts for its slums and city
decay that emphasizes its re-integration by way of nurturing its diversity and sense
of community. City planning needs to be practical and neighborhoods like
Willets Point need to be better taken care of. This brings us back to
Foreign Parts.
Conclusion
The emphasis of
city planning should be on better communities. In Foreign Parts there are scenes of parents spending time with their
children, groups of people playing together, children biking around, and pets
that give character to the neighborhood. With a simple dismissal that Willets
Point is a ‘dirty slum’ this natural life and activity is unfairly swept under
the rug. Even though there are difficulties, there is a real community that has
formed at Willets Point where people look out and support each other. There is
the sense that this mix group of people is somehow united. There are scenes of
them celebrating and doing other activities together. The fight of the legal
proprietor Ardizzone to stop the redevelopment seems to be that of a communal
one – this is what everyone wants. But it is not easy. Foreign Parts attempts to render the politics of this space through
its attention to these acts of resistance.
There
are scenes in Foreign Parts where the
sky in Willets Point is a bright blue color and everyone seems to be in a good
mood. The documentary has an oblique structure where it begins at the start of
a working-day and ends at dusk, the weather is bad at the beginning and becomes
good by the end, and a couple encounter problems and then they unite. Like
other directors that film these vanishing neighborhoods–the slums that fall
prey to urban redevelopment–like Pedro Costa and Mahamat Saleh Haroun, the
point of Paravel and Sniadecki’s Foreign
Parts is to remember and eulogize the people and the place as it was and by
picking sides with the losers of the progress of capitalism there can be a
trenchant critique of its underlying motives as well as a site of resistance.
Latour, Bruno, “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les differents modes
d’existence.” In
The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re-press (2011).
Harvey, David.
A Brief History of
Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press (2005).
Jacobs, Jane.
The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. New York: Vintage Books (1992).
