Roaming the wilderness of cities, time, and the vagaries of the film industry: The Exiles on DVD

Homer (Homer Nish) leans against the storefront window, his large head with its meticulously greased-back pompadour literally haloed by liquor. He’s just received a letter from back home, which he opens to read. While the film is heavily reliant on voice-over, repeatedly juxtaposing the disparate internal and external lives of its characters, it’s among the film’s masterstrokes that no voice-over is used here, in the very moment we most expect it. Yet Homer’s letter is, in a purely cinematic sense, read to us. As he unfolds the pages we’re taken from this neon-lit strip in Bunker Hill to a sun-beaten pastoral scene in Valentine, Arizona, where Homer’s family gathers beneath a tree near the shack we presume to be their home. There’s singing and dialogue, but no subtitles. We’re momentarily immersed in the distant world Homer mentally revisits during a pit-stop along yet another night on the town, getting drunk, gambling, maybe looking for a fight. There’s nostalgia in Homer’s voice-over for a time when Native Americans were nomadic and lived off the land, and implicit in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) is the notion that this tradition continues in some bastardized form, where wandering is limited to the confines of a neighbourhood literally on the verge of being condemned, and the land being lived off is comprised of the disposable consumer fruits of modern mass production. Like the climactic scene in which Homer and his friends drive up to Hill X—today’s Dodger Stadium—to play drums, get wild, and keep drinking, the bar-hopping reads as a distorted updating of once revered traditions.

Kent Mackenzie in production on The Exiles

Nearly 50 years on, The Exiles, which never received theatrical release until last year, still feels singular, ahead of its time and ours, and not only because of its bold blurring of documentary and fiction, its use of non-professional actors to tell their own stories in staged—and gorgeously photographed—scenes. As Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie emphasizes in the informative and hugely entertaining audio commentary, “I guarantee this was the first time in a motion picture you saw Indians in khakis, getting gas!” (Alexie also draws attention to such timeless items as the sense of mischief particular to Native American culture and the inexplicable persistence of “weak Indian moustaches.”) Fully integrated yet unmistakably Other, wearing the clothes and driving the cars and listening to the music of white Americans yet existing in a defiantly separate realm, the characters who inhabit The Exiles emerge from behind the veil of social invisibility and genre film stereotype, not for the purposes of liberal hand-wringing but to tell their own stories, or rather provide a complex and resolutely unresolved portrait of a problematic community. Thanks the Milestone’s superlative new two-disc package of The Exiles, which contains several additional works from Mackenzie, who died in the midst of a frustrated career in 1980, we can begin, however belatedly, to appreciate the themes that reside at the core of Mackenzie’s compressed oeuvre. His was a cinema of community. Above all, he seemed to cultivate a sense of place. And a sense of place is not complete until you convey a sense of how that place is shaped and made relevant by the people in it.

The Exiles follows three characters, each of them Native Americans relocated to Los Angeles after being raised on reserves, over a 12-hour period. Two of them—the men—go out for a night of revelry, the third—the beautiful, quiet and very pregnant Yvonne (Yvonne Williams)—out for a movie and, later, the company of a girlfriend. We glean something of their personal philosophies through the voice-over track that glides between them, but their portraits are only completed by Mackenzie’s ongoing movement between close-ups and wide shots of the city that looms over them. The evocation of Bunker Hill Mackenzie provided was sufficiently striking to be included in Thom Andersen’s monumental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), excerpted on the Exiles set, in which Andersen paid tribute to Mackenzie conveyance of how “different social realities coexist without touching each other.” Mackenzie’s early short, the elegant and touching ‘Bunker Hill 1956’ (56), also included here, laid the groundwork for such urban commentary by collecting the testimonies of three residents of this once affluent enclave which gradually became a haven for the pensioners and visible minorities. By then Bunker Hill was already slated for demolition and Mackenzie’s short functioned as a form of protest, a demand for affordable housing instead of throwing residents into further exile and destroying a vast expanse of architectural history. In ‘A Skill for Molina’ (64), Mackenzie by contrast applauds a federally-funded skill development program that allowed this documentary’s titular WWII vet and father of nine to gain a trade as a welder. Yet here too Mackenzie’s deftness with ambiguous understatement can be found in a montage sequence that shows Molina cutting each of his children’s hair—he had earlier took courses in hairdressing, but had to stop when he ran out of money.

Other highlights in Milestone’s set include an episode of ‘Leonard Lopate’ featuring the Exiles’ official “presenters” Alexie and director Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (77), while not directly influenced by The Exiles, was also successfully re-released by Milestone two years ago and now feels very much like a continuation of Mackenzie’s project. It begs the question: who’s continuing this work today?

The return of the Exiles

The silvery images of faces from a lost world dissolve into one another, faces with lines deep as arroyos and expressions that might suggest bitter resignation. Their gazes hint at some antagonism toward the camera. These old stills of Native Americans, taken more than a hundred years ago by Edward S. Curtis, compose the opening sequence of The Exiles, accompanied by the steady beating of a drum. They serve as context, the first part of a jarring entrée into Kent Mackenzie’s stark yet lively portrait of Native American youth in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district, circa 1961. The drum and traditional grooming gives way to rock and roll and pompadours, the images of plains to multistoried apartment blocks, broad avenues, bars and gas stations, and cramped, crowded flats where a radio or television always plays. That primordial drum will return however near the end of the film, though when it does it undercuts hoots and hollers, singing and laughter, honking horns, squashed beer cans, and girls asking to be left alone.

The juxtaposition between old ways and modern cacophony is de rigueur in aboriginal histories, but it appears here absent of forced pathos, a necessary prelude to a story placed firmly in the present rather than eulogizing the past. But this narrative of change and loss works on a number of levels. The film is also a study of Bunker Hill itself, once a zone of affluence and opulence that, by the time Mackenzie and his crew of fellow film school grads arrived to capture it, had already began its descent into postwar neglect and decay. Mackenzie had already made a controversial short in the neighbourhood while still at the University of Southern California entitled ‘Bunker Hill – 1956.’ But The Exiles was something still more ambitious, a distinctive construction of voice-over testaments concerning the inner lives of three Bunker Hill Native Americans and re-enactments featuring the actual subjects. The use of non-professional actors, or rather people being asked to “play” themselves, is elegantly executed, and looks forward to other such fusions of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques from the likes of Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf, to name but one prominent example.

So The Exiles is a very special film, and a landmark in the American cinema’s reflection on its own marginalized at the very least. Yet, following a triumphant premiere at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the film failed to secure commercial distribution and became a sort of legend, a film with a reputation vastly overwhelming its viewership. It’s prominent role in Thom Anderson’s 2003 compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself sparked the latest resurgence of interest, prompting a theatrical release from Milestone Films, the same company that ushered Charles Burnett’s 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep into theatres 30 years after its completion. Burnett himself, along with Sherman Alexie, supervised the restoration, courtesy of Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the belated release. The Exiles had its Canadian premiere at the Cinematheque Ontario last November, 47 years after its completion, Sadly, it was also 28 years after Mackenzie’s death.

The first disembodied voice to emerge in The Exiles is that of Yvonne (Yvonne Williams). She’s young, lovely, desperate and pregnant. The imminent child is the bright spot in her strained existence. Her husband Homer (Homer Nash) seems disinterested and cuts a dubious figure as a supporting patriarch. “He might change if he sees the baby,” she says at one point. “He likes children.” She returns home from the market and cooks up some pork chops and beans for Homer and his pals, who only vaguely acknowledge her. Soon the night comes and Yvonne is dropped at the movies while the boys go out for a long of night of drinking, gambling and wandering.

Homer himself picks up the film’s ongoing chain of voice-over once the night’s activities begin. He speaks of his restlessness and desire for some excitement, maybe get into a fight or something. How strange then, and compelling, that the Homer we see contrasts the Homer we hear, as well as the Homer Yvonne describes. While his friends become increasingly wild in their behaviour, Homer seems to get only more quiet, ending the night wrapped in a blanket and keeping to himself. At one point he discusses his upbringing back in rural Arizona, his childhood spent asking for money from white tourists snapping photos of the local Indians.

Rounding out the voice-over subjects is Tommy (Tommy Reynolds), a slick dancer and would-be ladies’ man. He figures white people have more problems than Indians, what with so much on their minds. He validates his unruly behaviour by its purity—when he parties, he parties right. He also becomes belligerent and rough with unwilling women. Yet there’s something poignant in the scene where he plays air piano on a wooden countertop in a bar along to some boogie-woogie, and the sense that this is the closest he ever comes to giving vent to a genuine talent.

The Exiles is all the more affecting and fascinating for its crispness, emphasis on observation over overt analysis, and its lack of sentimentality. Though presented with the nuance, textured imagery and rhythms of a fiction film, it gains considerable spontaneity and diversion from its documentary foundations. Especially intriguing is a strange scene where some white guy dances with a Chinese guy in a bar. But what makes the film gel so marvelously is its emphasis on people’s relationship to place. The subjects are people displaced in their own country—they are internal exiles. Mackenzie photographs them in such a way that they are never without context, without their surroundings looming over or around them, tacitly posing questions about where it is they think they belong. The scene of bleary morning stumbling home that ends the film promises renewal, but of what sort? What has changed? 50 years later, the questions linger in the air after the lights go down.