Deep Focus
I was delighted when the SFIFF folks asked me to write a catalog note for Foreign Parts, a sparkling documentary portrait of uncommon (and intertwined) social and sensory acuities. I watched it again with an appreciative crowd last Thursday and had the distinct feeling that I’ve only just started in with this movie. Without a top-heavy narration, the experience of the film is akin to that of getting to know a place. You begin disoriented and maybe a little stunned, ears and eyes freshly naïve. Little by little you form a mental map of routines and landmarks. The film gives you those cognitive sparks of familiarization: as a diner is a hub for the yard, so it is for the film’s structure. After the screening, J.P. Sniadecki spoke about organizing the film to reflect his and Véréna Paravel’s gradual adaptation, so that while the early fixed views convey distance and frank amazement at the filmmaking possibilities of the chops shops, eventually the camera comes to express recognition, concern, responsibility. As subjects unburden themselves or just show off, the shots take on more of a weight (patient docs like this film and The Arbor, also showing in SFIFF, revive the dramatic possibilities of the monologue). The camera drifts through the smoke of steaks on the grill and ducks snowballs—and it listens. The turning point towards this fuller embodied presence is a shot by Paravel: the camera spins around the diner with Julia, who’s often dancing, channeling a tenderness and intoxication that’s unavailable to the majority of American documentaries. Foreign Parts doesn’t mean to outrage us as a more standard expository presentation might, but the immersive aesthetics and ethics of the filmmaking leave us pained by the politics of indifference that shrouds the place.
I write this now because the film only shows once more in the festival, today at the Kabuki at 6:45. There are other solid options at this time, but you may not want to let this one slip away. In a couple of weeks, another resonant catalog of place will come to town as part of SF Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS weekend: Thom Andersen’s marvelous Get Out of the Car. The fact that you could conceivably switch the titles of the two films is inspiring me to consider them jointly…
