THE EXILES A-
USA (72 mi) 1961
d: Kent Mackenzie
A remarkable record of
a city that has vanished. —Thom Andersen, Los
Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Watching this early 1960’s film about American Indians
adapting to their city environment in the now demolished Bunker Hill district
of Los Angeles, the same neighborhood depicted a few years earlier by Joseph
Losey in M
(1951), where huge, sprawling Victorian mansions overlook the city and cheap
hotels are squeezed between old houses, with the Angels
Flight tramway traversing the steep incline of the hill, where in the space
of 12 hours they go on an all-night drinking binge, which is literally like
opening a time capsule to a different era, but despite the vintage cars and the
dated vernacular of the times (a trolley ride is only 5 cents, haircuts 25
cents, while gas is a whopping 27 cents a gallon), this film is as relevant
today as it was when it was made. The
film’s strength is its wrenchingly honest documentary style, where the reality
of a marginalized people whose past has been stolen from them is stunning, as
they feel as detached from the present as from their past, where they have
literally become exiles in their own country.
The film opens with sage words:
“The old people remember the past,” along with Edward Curtis portraits
of strong Indian faces in the late 19th century, a time when Indians were
forcibly evicted from a life of freedom on the open plains and ordered to live
on restricted reservation lands, a military and political act that effectively
cut native people’s ties to their heritage, the Exiles #1
1961 Native American History Conformity YouTube (21:16). More than a century later, they’re still searching
for it. It’s an undisputed fact that on
the East coast Mohawk Indians helped construct many of New York City’s tallest
skyscrapers, as they supposedly possess no fear of heights (The
Mohawks Who Built Manhattan - Native Village), but American Indians born on
U.S. soil were only granted full citizenship in 1924, yet voting rights were still
denied by individual states for several decades, where the final state to grant
full citizenship was New Mexico in 1962, only then becoming free members of
American society, coming several years “after” this was filmed, and nearly 100
years after the freedom of slaves. In
the 50’s and 60’s, in one of the untold historical migrations, many young
people moved off the reservations into the cities in search of a better life, many
who served in the army together, with Los Angeles becoming a primary
destination. By 1960 Los Angeles had the
largest urban concentration of American Indians in the country, but few found
opportunities awaiting them, a harsh reality this film reflects. The camera initially focuses on a neglected
pregnant wife, Yvonne Williams, whose husband Homer Nish (the spitting image of
César Rojas from the Los Lobos band, known for his wide girth, trademark black
sunglasses and slicked-back, black hair) all but ignores her and lays about
jobless all day long as he would rather hang around every night in the company
of friends than be at home. In the
opening moments of the film, we hear her in voiceover describe how she’s glad
to be off the reservation and hopes for a brighter future for her unborn
child. But life is no picnic in the city
either, especially when her husband avoids any connection to family and abandons
her every night while he and his friends mooch drinks and cigarettes, hustle up
whatever change they can scrounge together, and pretty much joyride and barhop
every night listening to Anthony Hilder and the Revels’ primitive rock ‘n’ roll
on the jukebox, THE REVELS - REVELLION (Impact)
YouTube (1:12), getting as drunk as possible on rotgut Thunderbird and Lucky
Lager beer.
Coming between Morris Engel’s Little
Fugitive (1953), John Cassavetes’ Shadows
(1959), and Shirley Clarke’s The
Cool World (1964), the film captures the raw, independent spirit of
American films, arguably the spiritual cousin of Charles Burnett’s Killer
of Sheep (1978), as both are neorealist black-and-white independent films
that use a documentary style to explore how minorities survive in downtrodden
regions of Los Angeles, both named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Literally unseen for decades, never finding a
distributor, despite premiering at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and making the
cover of Film Quarterly magazine,
lingering out of sight until Thomas Andersen sought rights from Mackenzie’s
family (as the director died at age 50 in 1980) to feature footage in his
amazing documentary Los
Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it was restored in 2008 by preservationist
Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who was responsible for
the restoration of Killer
of Sheep as well, comprised of three different storylines, almost as if
they’ve been stitched together, offering uniquely differing perspectives, as
they aren’t always on the same track. There
is barely any trace of anyone who is non-Indian, maintaining a separate
communal presence in such a large urban environment, existing in their own
figurative island, subject, for the most part, to their own laws and
rituals. The luscious black and white
photography by cinematographers John Morrill, Erik Daarstad, and Robert Kaufman
is extraordinary throughout, particularly the night photography, shot on a 35mm
Arriflex, utilizing a very modern free-form camera technique of weaving in and
out of crowds, capturing bar scenes, fights, sidewalk action, joyriding, and
people gathering together high atop Hill X (bulldozed for Dodger Stadium) after
the bars have closed at 2 am for more drinking, drumming, and chanting Indian
songs while also occasionally engaging in fisticuffs. While the camera captures the free-spirited
look of the times, the audio track reflects the lack of any script whatsoever
where much is dubbed from recorded interviews, so it lacks the searing
intensity of the images and despite its best efforts to remain relevant, falls
short in many respects. This may be what
the “original” version of Shadows
(1959) was like when it was completely improvised, filled with greetings, hip
expressions, and an otherwise detached way of communicating with one another
before Cassavetes sat down and wrote a more personal script. However this lack of personal connection in
THE EXILES matches the theme of the title.
The characters are so busy getting high and avoiding life and its
responsibilities that their evasiveness even from one another leaves them
completely detached from their own lives.
In one telling scene, Homer and his gang are sitting in a car smoking a
cigarette watching the cops routinely roust some customers in a bar before he
gets out, without a word, and enters the bar alone, If
you ever fall for someone - YouTube (1:36).
The guy doesn’t even feel like acknowledging his friends, he simply does
whatever the hell he feels like doing.
No questions asked. While in his
mind this feels like freedom, it’s actually another failed connection, as he exists
in a separate reality from the world around him. This stands in stark contrast to those Indian
portraits from the 19th century of men who lived in complete harmony with their
environment.
British/American filmmaker Kent Mackenzie endeared himself
to Bunker Hill and the people who lived there while a student at the University
of Southern California, completing his graduate film project, a documentary
entitled BUNKER HILL (1956) that featured old, dilapidated tenement homes in
the city’s most crowded neighborhood, with poor elderly pensioners concerned
about the city’s plans to demolish the neighborhood, as there was no similar low-rental
district in the city. Using leftover
film stock and working with fellow film students for no pay, he shot this film
in 1958, using borrowed equipment and spending a lot of time with a group of young
Native Americans that lived in Bunker Hill, where the original budget was only
$539, but a good deal of it was spent on alcohol, where the heavy alcohol
consumption in this film is literally scary, certainly part of the overall story,
but there is some question about the degree to which the director actually
enables or contributes to abhorrent social behavior, including woman continually
forced to fend off the predatory sexual behavior of inebriated men, seen
getting punched at one point, as the alcohol certainly contributes to a
perception of violence, and while not shown in the film, rape is certainly not
out of the question. Women are either
pursued sexually, with men continually grabbing at them, or completely ignored,
like Yvonne at home, with men only turning to them for money. One could argue about whether this is even a
documentary film, whether it might have been more powerful without
fictionalized re-enactments, like the director (in glasses) placing himself
behind Yvonne in the movie theater, but as is, we have never gotten such an
unflinchingly realistic glimpse of Indians carousing, particularly wandering in
and out of bars they frequent, offering a social portrait on being poor and
being Indian that is simply remarkable, with three figures narrating their own
extended sequences in the film. Perhaps
the real revelation at the time of the release was seeing Indians doing such
ordinary things, like window shopping, going to the movies, buying groceries,
driving cars, or pumping gas, as American film had never portrayed this
before. Indians in westerns were always
seen on horses living in teepees, which makes this film all the more enduring, seen
in an urban environment where they have blended into the popular culture of the
50’s, rebellious outcasts who are capable of controlling their own destinies. To its credit, this film features transplants
from the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, but also members of other
tribes, men and women who have never been welcome anywhere except in the
company of other Indians, all living hardscrabble lives in a fringe world where
arrests and police intervention are the norm, where Homer’s drinking buddy,
ex-convict Tommy Reynolds, exclaims that life on the outside or inside prison
is all the same to him, as either way it’s just doing time. What’s uniquely relevant in the film is the
focus on subjects rarely seen in front of cameras before, offering sympathetic
views of young men and women that live their lives hard and fast and age
quickly, consuming ungodly amounts of cheap alcohol, where their treatment of
women is equally abominable, and their own life expectancy is short. Outside of Yvonne, a prisoner of cultural
neglect who has to stay with a girlfriend for companionship, no one even hopes
for a better existence. This is all
there is.
Kent MacKenzie, THE EXILES - The
Center for Studies in Americ
10-page screen notes (pdf)
Postscript
John Patterson from The
Guardian, February 17, 2010, The
lure of the night | Documentary films | The Guardian
To add texture and verisimilitude, Mackenzie
asked his actors to speak of their own lives, and their hardscrabble ways led
to certain continuity problems.
“Characters’ facial features were altered by fist-fights, their costumes
ripped in brawls or stolen while they were drunk,” Mackenzie wrote. Nonetheless, the impression is of a
proto-beatnik brotherhood, tearing up the night to a honking soundtrack by the
Revels. The Exiles is anything but depressing or admonitory.
And then it vanished. David James, head of film at USC, suggests
two reasons for this. Firstly, The Exiles worked in a documentary style
that was soon to become obsolete for 20 years. “It was poetic, visually
striking, great 35mm stock. But around
this time, cinema verité was coming in: 16mm, handheld, sync sound, and instead
of prizing visual appearance, film-makers now prized authenticity and
non-intervention, so this kind of documentary was discredited.”
Secondly, says James, “by the beginning
of the next decade, the 70s, the civil rights movement had entered into film
culture and minority peoples had started demanding the right to represent
themselves. So the idea of a white male
representing Native American people was discredited.”
Mackenzie went on to work as an editor
on industrial shorts, medical films and TV documentaries, mostly with a
progressive bent, throughout the 60s and 70s, and taught high-school classes in
Marin County on Super-8 film-making. He
died young, in 1980, of complications from medication he was taking.
Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films,
which has restored The Exiles, says
the cast fared badly in later life. He
tried to track them down for its release, with little luck. “Homer died young. Most of the others too, in their 30s and
40s. Yvonne is the only one who is still
alive. She had two babies during the
production, and they both died. It’s a
problem for her, seeing the movie. If
you’re drinking and partying, particularly if you’re poor, dying young is
something that happens more often.”
