Exiles will enthrall serious cinephiles

Since it debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, Kent Mackenzie’s superb pseudo-documentary The Exiles has largely faded from memory, the victim of a distribution and exhibition environment which then, as now, looked askance at anything that defied convention. Thanks to a sparkling new restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with the cooperation of the University of Southern California Moving Image Archive, the national Film Preservation Foundation and distributor Milestone, this seminal example of late ‘50s American independent filmmaking is receiving a new lease on life. Though it arrives nearly three decades too late for Mackenzie to enjoy its resurrection, it comes none too soon to enthrall serious cinephiles seeking respite from the assaultive bombast of studio summer blockbusters. A successful run in limited release should help the picture dovetail into healthy and enduring returns on DVD.

A neorealist recreation of one night in the lives of three Native Americans who have relocated from their reservations to Los Angeles in search of better lives, The Exiles employs documentary narration by those same individuals to create a fascinating hybrid that is neither fully documentary nor fully narrative, yet which manages to fully succeed in ways that few pure documentaries or narrative films ever do. Once filled with dreams and hopes, Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) now finds herself increasingly doomed to a life which, while clearly better than what she would have had on the Apache reservation, falls well shy of what she once imagined Los Angeles would offer her. Now pregnant and married to the well meaning but shiftless Homer (Homer Nish), her days are consumed by the most painful form of self-torture—window-shopping the things she knows she will never have. Insensitive to his wife’s feelings, Homer has opened their home to five of his squatter friends with whom he regularly parties while leaving his wife alone. On this particular night, Yvonne is sent to the movies while Homer and his buddies head for the bars and clubs of L.A.’s Bunker Hill. As Homer splits off for a poker game, his buddy Tommy (Tommy Reynolds) pairs up with another friend for a night of drinking and girls.

The use of non-actors playing themselves, recreating incidents from their own recent past, lends a haunting authenticity to the proceedings; as a snapshot of a bygone time and place in the history of Los Angeles, the film also manages to evoke even broader emotions now—particularly among Angelenos—regarding the loss of heritage and the reinvention of urban identity. The picture’s impact today owes as much to Mackenzie’s intentional choices—the extraordinary juxtaposition of the narration—as to such practical considerations as shooting the film silent and looping the dialogue after-the-fact (a common practice for low-budget independent films of the day), having the unintended effect of making certain key sequences feel almost surreal, even poetic.

The greatest beneficiary of the restoration, however, is the stunning black-and-white photography by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morrill, which at long last can be seen precisely as intended. The soulful photographic evocation of one neighborhood’s heart and soul, its mysterious shadows and neon-clustered gathering spots, gives vibrant life to a place which is as much a character as the young Indians.

It would be a mistake, however, to overly emphasize the film’s artifactual nature—as much as it represents, in both form and content, something of an extinct species, the underlying concerns and central human dilemmas are as timely now as they were in 1961. In an age when the greatest migrations are no longer parochial but global, an unintended metaphor emerges—all the world a reservation, and each of its inhabitants a lonely indigene.

Distributor: Milestone Films
Cast: Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish and Tommy Reynolds
Director/Screenwriter/Producer: Kent Mackenzie
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 72 min.
Release date: July 11