The Exiles
Directed by Kent Mackenzie
at the IFC Center
July 11-17
The Exiles is a curatorial godsend like last year’s decades-late theatrical release of Killer of Sheep. Charles Burnett and Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie sponsor this long-overdue presentation of the 1961 film by the late Kent Mackenzie, and it has the same chastising effect. Mackenzie’s sparkling, moody black-and-white images of what might be called the Native American Diaspora (following a generation of Indians who moved off the reservation and migrated to post-war Los Angeles), depict a classic American story of aspiration and tragedy. It is beautiful and devastating.
Styled between documentary and neo-realism, The Exiles projects the same curiosity and compassion that marked Visconti’s great story of Sardinian peasants, La Terra Trema. Mackenzie shifts between a historical prologue and a story that alternates voiceover confessions by a husband and his pregnant wife whose imaginative lives are drifting apart. She goes to the movies and window shops alone, while he hangs out with male friends—their off hours spent cruising in automobiles or at bars on the neon-lit strip.
Also like Visconti’s epic film, this is a sophisticated form of political and aesthetic accusation. The Exiles presents a view of Los Angeles life and American history that our mainstream movies have regrettably ignored. Try conceiving the underside of film noir where even the racism of white-obsessed story lines is just the top layer of a deeper economic neglect. Mackenzie explores Native American impoverishment similar to the way his rarely seen 1969 film Saturday Afternoon about a teenage group-encounter session augured the themes of adolescent alienation and desire in George Washington. His every shot not only reproves Hollywood’s established fantasies of California life but 46 years later also calls attention to a cultural tradition of sociological and spiritual oversight: The Exiles, which is being distributed through the yeoman work of Milestone Films, unfortunately, is not a one-of-a-kind movie. It belongs to a legacy that includes films as recent as Once Were Warriors, Ask the Dust—overlooked stories that illuminate the social conditions of non-white characters’ emotional struggles.
It starts with a heartbreaking reveille: “Once the American Indian lived in the ordered freedom of his own culture. Then in the 19th Century, the white man confined him within the boundaries of the tribal reservation. The old people remembered the past, they witnessed great changes.” Then it switches to fascinating time-capsule images of “modern” L.A. as stylish and evocative as a Roy DeCarava exhibition. The leap forward causes these images to oppose the romantic beauty of John Ford’s westerns—and the Native American emotional holocaust strikes through our consciousness.
That is, if we have a cinematic conscience. The Exiles reminds us how Alex Cox’s Repo Man was one of the few films to bring L.A. 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, L.A. 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.
Mackenzie’s scenes of the demoralized families anesthetizing themselves with zombie-like TV-watching (westerns, of course) recall Costa’s pseudo metaphysics. But The Exiles is rooted in feeling and detail: the culture of news magazines, comic books, rock ’n’ roll on the radio, hair styles that pass for Latino slickness, relatively prosperous ghetto/barrios and a subculture of alcoholism. The bar moments are unforgettable: An interracial gay couple makes a scene that connects racial and sexual oppression; it evokes Stefan Nadelman’s invaluable NYC document Terminal Bar. Most extraordinary is a half-drunk discussion about Huey "Piano" Smith and Fats Domino: where a young Indian Angeleno manically pounds the keyboard of an invisible imaginary piano. It’s an image of cultural loss—what it means to be uprooted.
The Exile’s modest but elegant style (sometimes awkward acting and off-sync dialogue) never detracts from its impact; every gesture is redolent of effort and aspiration. If there’s a flaw, it’s that there’s little of the leavening wit in Killer of Sheep’s daily-life panoply. These handsome, noble people seem too stoic and humorless—until a nighttime revelry in the Hollywood hills provokes some loose tribal dancing and drumming. Yet, it’s impossible to watch this movie without feeling a wave of empathy. Mackenzie’s aesthetic refinement links these moments of disenfranchisement to the past and to the future—and that keeps The Exiles from sinking into guilt.
Directed by Kent Mackenzie
at the IFC Center
July 11-17
The Exiles is a curatorial godsend like last year’s decades-late theatrical release of Killer of Sheep. Charles Burnett and Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie sponsor this long-overdue presentation of the 1961 film by the late Kent Mackenzie, and it has the same chastising effect. Mackenzie’s sparkling, moody black-and-white images of what might be called the Native American Diaspora (following a generation of Indians who moved off the reservation and migrated to post-war Los Angeles), depict a classic American story of aspiration and tragedy. It is beautiful and devastating.
Styled between documentary and neo-realism, The Exiles projects the same curiosity and compassion that marked Visconti’s great story of Sardinian peasants, La Terra Trema. Mackenzie shifts between a historical prologue and a story that alternates voiceover confessions by a husband and his pregnant wife whose imaginative lives are drifting apart. She goes to the movies and window shops alone, while he hangs out with male friends—their off hours spent cruising in automobiles or at bars on the neon-lit strip.
Also like Visconti’s epic film, this is a sophisticated form of political and aesthetic accusation. The Exiles presents a view of Los Angeles life and American history that our mainstream movies have regrettably ignored. Try conceiving the underside of film noir where even the racism of white-obsessed story lines is just the top layer of a deeper economic neglect. Mackenzie explores Native American impoverishment similar to the way his rarely seen 1969 film Saturday Afternoon about a teenage group-encounter session augured the themes of adolescent alienation and desire in George Washington. His every shot not only reproves Hollywood’s established fantasies of California life but 46 years later also calls attention to a cultural tradition of sociological and spiritual oversight: The Exiles, which is being distributed through the yeoman work of Milestone Films, unfortunately, is not a one-of-a-kind movie. It belongs to a legacy that includes films as recent as Once Were Warriors, Ask the Dust—overlooked stories that illuminate the social conditions of non-white characters’ emotional struggles.
It starts with a heartbreaking reveille: “Once the American Indian lived in the ordered freedom of his own culture. Then in the 19th Century, the white man confined him within the boundaries of the tribal reservation. The old people remembered the past, they witnessed great changes.” Then it switches to fascinating time-capsule images of “modern” L.A. as stylish and evocative as a Roy DeCarava exhibition. The leap forward causes these images to oppose the romantic beauty of John Ford’s westerns—and the Native American emotional holocaust strikes through our consciousness.
That is, if we have a cinematic conscience. The Exiles reminds us how Alex Cox’s Repo Man was one of the few films to bring L.A. 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, L.A. 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.
Mackenzie’s scenes of the demoralized families anesthetizing themselves with zombie-like TV-watching (westerns, of course) recall Costa’s pseudo metaphysics. But The Exiles is rooted in feeling and detail: the culture of news magazines, comic books, rock ’n’ roll on the radio, hair styles that pass for Latino slickness, relatively prosperous ghetto/barrios and a subculture of alcoholism. The bar moments are unforgettable: An interracial gay couple makes a scene that connects racial and sexual oppression; it evokes Stefan Nadelman’s invaluable NYC document Terminal Bar. Most extraordinary is a half-drunk discussion about Huey "Piano" Smith and Fats Domino: where a young Indian Angeleno manically pounds the keyboard of an invisible imaginary piano. It’s an image of cultural loss—what it means to be uprooted.
The Exile’s modest but elegant style (sometimes awkward acting and off-sync dialogue) never detracts from its impact; every gesture is redolent of effort and aspiration. If there’s a flaw, it’s that there’s little of the leavening wit in Killer of Sheep’s daily-life panoply. These handsome, noble people seem too stoic and humorless—until a nighttime revelry in the Hollywood hills provokes some loose tribal dancing and drumming. Yet, it’s impossible to watch this movie without feeling a wave of empathy. Mackenzie’s aesthetic refinement links these moments of disenfranchisement to the past and to the future—and that keeps The Exiles from sinking into guilt.
