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The Exiles was shot in 1958, completed in 1961, and unveiled at
the Venice and San Francisco film festivals later that year. It should
have swept immediately into movie houses on the strength of critical
acclaim; a reviewer for Film Quarterly deemed it “an original and
personal film which defies classification,” and Pauline Kael, never all
that easy to please, called it one of the very few films that 1961 would
be remembered by. Distributors were wary of its offbeat subject and
style, though. A thoughtful semidocumentary about Native Americans in
contemporary Los Angeles seemed way too specialized for the theatrical
circuit. On top of that, writer-producer-director Kent Mackenzie wasn’t a
Native American himself, or even an American – he hailed from England,
although his family moved to the United States when he was young and he
made The Exiles as a graduate project in the USC cinema
department.
A releasing company finally acquired the picture after its showing at the
first New York Film Festival in 1964, but only on 16mm for the
nontheatrical market. When those prints wore out, the movie’s visibility
vanished as well – until 2008, when the UCLA Film & Television Archive
finished a two-year project of restoring it and Milestone Film arranged a
world re-premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, followed by the theatrical
run it’s richly deserved for almost fifty years. Its superbly produced
DVD edition, also from Milestone, should assure its status as a landmark
of American independent film. The picture is “presented” by Native
American writer Sherman Alexie, whose credits include the 1998 indie
Smoke Signals, and Charles Burnett, the African-American filmmaker
whose 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep also went through decades
of near-invisibility before UCLA and Milestone rescued it in
2007.
The Exiles is unusual for many reasons, starting with its highly
unconventional approach to story and character. The plot is open-ended
and meandering, played out by characters whose lives and words are based
on the actors’ own experiences. The setting is the Bunker Hill section of
Los Angeles, which had a large community of Indians who moved there from
reservations (in Arizona, mostly) with help from a government program.
The main characters are Yvonne, a pregnant Apache woman; her husband
Homer, a Hualapi with indolent habits; and Tommy, a Mexican guy who lives
with them. They and their friends are young, poor, fundamentally aimless,
and headed for unpromising futures, all of which was true of the actors
as well – indeed, several cast members landed in jail during the
production and were unavailable for shooting until Mackenzie bailed them
out. Set during a single night, the movie follows Yvonne as she makes
dinner for the men, wanders around the area, and remembers former dreams
of having a solid, stable home. It also watches Homer and Tommy as they
get drunk, cruise for girls, get drunker, and meet other Indians for
hilltop drumming and dancing. At the end another day is dawning, certain
to be as purposeless and inconclusive as this one.
One of the most impressive qualities of The Exiles is its
insistence on observing but never exploiting the characters’
shortcomings. “I had seen many…documentaries in which the squalor and
horror of poverty were [overly] emphasized,” Mackenzie wrote in his
master’s thesis about the production. “I hoped that I wouldn’t
superimpose any such illusions on these people.” To make this happen he
asked his nonprofessional cast to participate fully in creating the
situations, the dialogue, and occasional voiceovers that offer glimpses
of characters’ inner lives. The production budget was so low that the
crew couldn’t afford a sound-reducing blimp for their noisy camera, so
they settled for low-quality recording that served as a guide when the
actors returned to re-record the dialogue – with marvelous results – two
years later. Like the cinematography, which creates small miracles of
beauty out of the most mundane material imaginable, the funky sound (and
pitch-perfect rock-music score) adds vibrancy and texture without
diminishing the movie’s sense of palpable reality. “We will work in the
tradition of the human and social documentary,” Mackenzie wrote in his
1956 funding proposal, “and the Indian point of view will be paramount.”
The project went through many permutations between then and 1961, but the
filmmakers never wavered from that agenda.
The rediscovery of The Exiles started when writer-director Thom
Andersen used some of its footage in Los Angeles Plays Itself, his
2003 compilation showing how the city’s image, neighborhoods, and people
have been represented (and misrepresented) in movies over the years.
Milestone’s two-disc DVD edition of The Exiles includes this
portion of Andersen’s documentary as an extra, and his commentary points
up the value of Mackenzie’s picture as a record not only of bygone Native
American lifestyles but also of the defunct Bunker Hill district where
the film unfolds; as Andersen says, “it proves that there once was a city
here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” Andersen also
places The Exiles in a genre he calls the “cinema of walking,”
which is exactly right. Although he doesn’t mention this, a 1960s
anthropological study found that nonprofessional Navajo filmmakers showed
tremendous amounts of walking in their movies, reflecting an aspect of
Indian tradition that also glimmers through Mackenzie’s urban scenes,
enriching them in subtle and sensitive ways.
On the surface, The Exiles has similarities with John Cassavetes’s
legendary Shadows, which was shot in New York at around the same
time. Shadows had a professional cast, however, and its characters
had more to do with fiction than with the real-life experiences of the
actors. Others have compared Mackenzie’s work with that of Chris Eyre,
who directed Smoke Signals, and of black filmmakers such as
Burnett and Haile Gerima in the 1970s and 1980s. But ultimately The
Exiles is one of a kind, and the DVD edition demonstrates this with
an extraordinary array of extras. Among them are several excellent short
documentaries that Mackenzie made before his untimely death in 1980;
additional shorts about the Bunker Hill area; a commentary track, radio
appearance, and informal conversation between Alexie and critic Sean
Axmaker; a pristine transfer of the 1910 melodrama White Dawn’s
Devotion, which was probably the first Native American movie; a
DVD-ROM package with preliminary scripts for The Exiles, original
publicity materials, Mackenzie’s graduate thesis, and the screenplay for
“The Jug Band Man,” his last, unfinished film; and more. I can’t remember
when I’ve seen a more informative, entertaining, and all-around exemplary
DVD edition. Like the movie it spotlights, it’s truly something to
celebrate.
For more information about The Exiles, visit The Official Site. To order The
Exiles, go to
TCM Shopping.
by David Sterritt
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