The Exiles.

"The Exiles, a film about American Indians living on the edge of downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s, is both a chronicle and a casualty of neglect: a movie about a forsaken community that itself became a lost object," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "Directed by Kent Mackenzie, a first-time filmmaker who had just graduated from the University of Southern California, it is a poetic and empathetic hybrid of fiction and documentary.... [Cinematographer John] Morrill said The Exiles was an attempt to return documentary to the tradition of Robert Flaherty, whose films incorporated staged elements, and Humphrey Jennings, whose dramatized documentary about the London blitz, Fires Were Started, was a major influence. 'We never thought documentaries had to be newsreels, and we didn't have any compunction about using narrative techniques,' Mr Morrill said."

Updated through 7/12.

Saul Austerlitz in the Los Angeles Times:

Lounging at downtown bars such as the Ritz and the Columbine, Mackenzie got to know the people who would ultimately appear as actors in The Exiles, which opens Aug 15 at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater, re-creating moments that Mackenzie had observed during his months with them. The director then recruited passionate fellow students from USC such as Morrill to assist in their deeply unusual film. "Horrified that we might learn to make films the way everyone else seemed to be making them," Mackenzie wrote in a thesis he submitted to USC about the film, "almost in desperation we started on The Exiles.

[...]

For its rebirth, The Exiles has two die-hard cinéastes to thank: Thom Andersen and Dennis Doros. Andersen, who had seen the film at a UCLA screening in the 1960s, first dragged the picture out of the darkness in which it had languished by highlighting The Exiles in his own 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, as one of the greatest realist films ever made about the city and an antidote to the endless procession of misguided, simplistic LA movies.... Andersen's seal of approval provided the impetus for Doros and his film distribution company, Milestone, which last year rereleased Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, to look into bringing the film to the public with some restoration help from the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

At the IFC Center for a week starting this Friday.

Updates, 7/9: "For the length of Kent Mackenzie's 1961 feature, the past is not distant: It's vital, concrete, immediate—a record of vanished sites and vanquished dreams suspended in an eternally looped present," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "[T]his 50-year-old film about a Los Angeles neighborhood on the skids and its barely tethered dwellers stands as the freshest movie in theaters."

"While John Cassavetes's landmark Shadows (made during the same period) offers jazz-scored racial politics through an accessible romantic narrative, MacKenzie's unique achievement wanders frustratingly, but also hypnotically, into the outer limits of plot and character, abandoning conventional reportage for a hybridized documentary/fictional group portrait captured in gorgeous, shadowy textures and moods," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

Updates, 7/10: "I have no doubt that Mackenzie was committed to honestly documenting a ghettoized, desperately impoverished minority that a wealthy city chose to ignore, and also to finding moments of wild poetry in the experience of people with whom he empathized," writes Amy Taubin for Artforum. "Still, I could not help but notice that what was on the screen was in fact a bunch of drunken Indians - not Indians acting drunk and pawing at women but, well, the real thing, aided and abetted by the film's director.... At the time of its original release, The Exiles was treated with great respect by critics and cinephiles.... The veneration of the re-release has been even more over-the-top. I can only look at the screen and wonder, What's wrong with this picture?"

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And on a similar note, here's James Van Maanen's take...

The immense celebratory tone surrounding the first theatrical release of The Exiles - Kent Mackenzie's 1961 made-on-a-shoestring movie about American Indians (plus a Latino or two), fairly fresh off the reservation and marking time in Los Angeles - is fully warranted. Unfortunately, the celebration is due less to the merits of the film itself and more to the understandable thrill of its finally achieving a theatrical release 47 years after the fact. I believe that credit and honor are also being given now for the ideas and labor that went into the original production, as well as for the time and effort spent on the fine restoration given the movie by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with the help of the University of Southern California Moving Image Archive, the National Film Preservation Foundation - and Milestone Film & Video, which is releasing it theatrically. Thanks, too, should probably be paid to Sherman Alexie (Smoke Signals) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), two noted moviemakers whose names appear in the credits above the title and who most likely devoted time, energy (and maybe even money?) to this endeavor.

Mackenzie (who died in 1980) began filming The Exiles in January of 1958 and continued off and on through April of 1961. His finished film premiered at both the Venice and San Francisco film festivals later that same year and then played the international festival circuit for some time. Judged "too difficult" by distributors of the day, it never saw theatrical release - until this Friday, July 11, when it opens at NYC's IFC Center.

Not apparently a fan of the ash-can school of documentaries (The Exiles is not a documentary, although it most definitely uses a documentary style), Mackenzie is on record as wanting to avoid "the romance of poverty," and not wanting to be attracted by the strangeness of a foreign environment; nor did he want to emphasize the squalor and horror of poverty to the exclusion of all else, or impose his own illusions on his subjects. Toward this goal, the filmmaker befriended Indian and Latino residents of the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles and over time worked with them on his/their script, with the express purpose of making a movie that would present a realistic portrait of Native American life in the LA community - one that would also avoid false stereotypes of Indians in films. In order to judge how well Mackenzie has succeeded or avoided all this, you will need to see the film. To my mind, the filmmaker's reach rather noticeably exceeded his grasp.

Much of the above information is taken from the press kit about the movie, which runs 21 pages of relatively small type, and actually took longer to navigate, read and digest than sitting through the entire 72-minute movie. All this history and verbiage does go a distance toward burnishing The Exiles' reputation. But since most viewers - likely to be made up of hard-core film buffs rather than walk-in attendees - will not have the benefit of press information, I think we must concentrate on "the thing itself."

The Exiles charts approximately half a day - late afternoon until the following early morning - in the lives of a group of Indians (and again, a few Latinos) as they talk, drink, shop, eat, drink, date, drink, gamble, drive (and drink), fight and sleep. The black-and-white cinematography is surprisingly rich and more nuanced than you'd imagine, given the budget restrictions of these beginners in film. And, of course, what fun it is to see downtown Los Angeles again, circa 1958, with that wonderful LA version of a cable car on the nearly perpendicular hill known as Angels Flight.

The performances from Mackenzie's amateur cast are also better than you might expect, with dialogue that is believable for a time, until it becomes apparent that most of it is simply generic and, finally, tiresome. No attempt has been made to create any kind of interesting, nuanced story, other than the obvious "this is a typical night, with typical characters doing typical things." Granted, we must receive this film via the time period from which it came (in 1959, in the middle of Mackenzie's endeavor, Cassavetes' Shadows made its debut, and the two films bear some resemblance). The "reality" of the day appeared to be best achieved by shoving the camera in a face and recording "real" moments. Times/styles have changed, but back then, this approach seemed highly original and effective.

As for the wish to avoid stereotypes of Indians in films, well, the movie seems awash in them. Does the word "firewater" ring a bell? It's not used here, but after the non-stop drinking on view, you'll want to cry, "Get those guys the fuck away from alcohol!" Is all this drinking realistic? Probably. But exactly how does showing it in this manner circumvent stereotype? The young woman we see most often talks to herself (or us) about the importance of having her soon-to-be-born baby and muses on a few other subjects. The other women all exist as appendages to the men, who treat them, of course, like shit. Realistic? Sure. The penultimate scene takes place on a hill above the city, where everyone comes to play drums and sing their native tribal songs. But by now, they're so drunk that they can do little but babble and fight. (Jesus: I know I sound like someone from the temperance league, but couldn't anybody have talked about his life, her work - some of them have jobs, surely - or just indulged in a moment of one-on-one communication that did not involved the urge to screw, imbibe or evacuate? I guess not.)

Part of the point of this film is that, since Los Angeles itself was not communicating with these displaced people, they had lost the ability or urge to communicate with each other on any important level. There is almost no hope in The Exiles, and perhaps that is why I find it so difficult and one-note. It does, however, bring up another unpleasant thought: How much different are things for Native Americans now? Maybe it's time for Alexie to give us something again as wonderful as his decade-old Smoke Signals (which Chris Eyre directed) or the less wonderful but still quite good Business of Fancydancing. As usual, our remaining Native Americans are under-seen and under-served. The tardy release of The Exiles won't change that, but the movie stands as an interesting, if circumscribed, past chapter in their lives.

-James Van Maanen

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"The Exiles projects the same curiosity and compassion that marked Visconti's great story of Sardinian peasants, La Terra Trema," suggests Armond White in the New York Press. It also "reminds us how Alex Cox's Repo Man was one of the few films to bring LA subcultures out of the shadows. But Mackenzie's tale of Indians adrift also poignantly recalls the underbelly truth of a great mainstream film like Altman's California Split, which shares a startlingly similar poker-game subplot. That today's film culture has grown obscenely comfortable with the white-supremacist lies of film noir (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, LA Confidential) creates an ongoing form of cultural alienation and disenfranchisement. The nightmare is apparent in elitist reviews that praise the art-house racism of Pedro Costa's movies without ever dealing with their socio-political content and mandarin detachment."

Updates, 7/11: "Like his contemporaries Cassavetes, Truffaut and Godard (whose work he may or may not have seen), Mackenzie is pursuing subjective human experience, not intellectual analysis, and his extraordinary shot-sequences - like the giddy, drunken, hair-raising drive through a tunnel in a top-down convertible - address issues of signification more than anything I could say about the film," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's worth adding that the terrific original garage-rock score is by an LA band called the Revels, whose song 'Comanche' appears both here and in Pulp Fiction, a movie unquestionably influenced by this one. If the stagey, docudrama quality of The Exiles takes time to get used to, as does the odd, artificial 'post-sync' sound - nearly all the dialogue was recorded in a studio, after the fact, as in many European films of the period - the startling naturalism of the images still wins out."

"Writers like Nathanael West, John Fante and Chester Himes, among others, had each mapped out their version of outsider Los Angeles by the time Mr Mackenzie began making The Exiles," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "During the Depression, Fante lived on Bunker Hill on a sustenance diet of literary dreams, and wrote eloquently about the divide between the city's promise and its reality, its sunshine days and enveloping nights. ('The hot semitropical nights will reek of romance you'll never have.') The American Indians in The Exiles may be more real than most movie subjects. But, steeped in what [Norman M] Klein calls 'postcolonial noir,' they are also in the grip of a durable Los Angeles nightmare. It's impossible to know where their reality ends and Mr Mackenzie's begins."

"For a film about Native Americans depleting what's left of their lives in skid row haunts, The Exiles is a groovy visual experience," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "The film's conclusion left me longing for a sequel, or some once-a-decade check-ins. Whatever happened to Homer and Yvonne? I mean the real ones as much as their characters. It's that kind of movie."

"The cinematic landscape has since witnessed more than four decades of spare, virtually plotless foreign and indie films about people hanging out, and if anything, The Exiles feels a little protozoan," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Better then to admire The Exiles for its specific docu-realist elements, which preserve places and moments that viewers won't find in any other film."

The Exiles and Killer of Sheep "bear similar concerns and moods, not to mention a focus on a migrated community," notes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "But it would be unfair to expect Mackenzie's film to match the critical (and box-office) success of Mr Burnett's film. On its own terms, The Exiles brings back lives and sights that might otherwise continue to disappear into the past."

Eric Kohn talks with Alexie and Burnett for indieWIRE.

Update, 7/12: "[T]o compare Mackenzie's film to either Burnett's or Cassevettes's is to overstate not only its historical stature but its artistry, given that despite enveloping atmospherics and stunning aestheticism, Exiles is a more limited and problematic work," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at July 6, 2008 7:26 AM