The Exiles

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Kent MacKenzie gives us a 24-hour slice of the life of a young couple who moved from the reservation to Los Angeles in the 50s. I can go back and appreciate this now that I am older; much more than I would have at 11.

It is not a pretty picture. The men didn't work and spent their time drinking and gambling and hanging out. The wives were expected to feed them, clean their clothing, and give them what money they had.

There was a real fatalism in their voices and attitudes. Life was a party, and if things didn't work out, you could always go back to the reservation. Doing time? No problem, I do it outside, so I can do it inside.

Added to the National Film Registry this year, it is a slice of life that shows no promise.

The premise is simple-we follow a group of young, modern day Native American men and women in Los Angeles over 24 hours. We experience their daily rituals, conflicts, and pleasures, and, for the most part, I found this rather simple film to be highly interesting. Although it remains virtually plot less throughout, there are some moments of conflict and surprising intensity that save it from being "boring" or overly mundane. The tragedies as well as the comedies of life are explored, as personalities, feelings, and opinions are revealed and studied.

The highlights of the film are the dazzlingly beautiful voice over sequences, in which a random character will voice their perspective on their way of life or their friends or their hopes and aspirations, and so on. They transform the every man into a wise and lovable poet. We understand and learn about our characters more and more not only through their subtle actions, but also their words and ways of communicating.

However, there are moments of boredom here. I think this movie would have worked better as a lengthy short film that would be, say, 35-40 minutes long. That would be perfect. Either that or a little bit more conflict or humor or just flat out interesting events.

This was one of the first films to deal with the contemporary lives of Native Americans. It's still one of the very few pieces to deal with the Native urban diaspora, in this case in the no-longer existing LA neighborhood of Bunker Hill, in 1961.

More broadly, "Exiles" is a film about displacement, and finding oneself in a state of displacement, of having one's truest self be the displaced self. It focuses on a young, married couple who hardly see each other. The husband is out cavorting and fighting with other young quasi- hooligans. The wife is mostly alone, or abandoned at the cinema. The only scene where we sense that she is bonding with anybody is when she is in bed, in an officially asexual way, with a girlfriend.

As an empathetic depiction of the alienation that occurs when people are divorced from their (essentially extinct) culture, one cannot help but admire the film. Yet, I was left with the troubling sense that its depiction of characters driven to cling to each other based on the most basic similarities, such as tribe,race, and, perhaps most importantly in the eyes of the filmmakers, gender, was decidedly heteronormative. I wouldn't go so far as to call the film homophobic. The only brazenly gay characters, a couple of dudes dancing in a "straight" bar, are depicted in a neutral light. Yet, the isolation of man from woman, and "debauched" same-sex mingling are depicted as the prime symptoms of alienation under colonialism and capitalism. This attitude was all too common amid leftists in the era that the film was made.

For contemporary viewers, perhaps the most rewarding thing about The Exiles is its luscious black and white cinematography of the now destroyed Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. As a documentary extra on the DVD further attests, Bunker Hill was a dynamic, multinational district that was home to immigrant families and retired professionals. Soon after this movie was completed, the neighborhood was bulldozed in an attempt to "improve" LA. In this way, the film seems like a depiction of two fallen cultures: the exiles of crushed Native American culture inhabiting an urban landscape that is itself now only a celluloid ghost.

A belated attempt at an American neorealism or rather peaceful protest against the chintz and artifice of Hollywood with a document of the down and out who the movies were never about, either way this film about a group of young indians eking out a living in downtown Los Angeles is a rare artifact and an amazing find.

The lives; equal parts mundane and exciting, wearily enthusiastic at the prospect of another night where nothing but time flies and the same people are bolted down in the same bar stools. Beer bottles change hands over cheap formica counters, people dance, look around bored, smile at looking and being looked, saunter and stroll around aimless. During most of this the woman is back in a movie theater catching a late-night show. At some point the lights come up and intermission music plays from the speakers as sleepy patrons stretch and look around with drowsy eyes; it's that kind of movie. The moments no self-respecting Hollywood movie would bore its audience with, here strung up to see what kind of life they make up.

But most importantly, what precious, valuable poem about a Los Angeles that is no more. Not the Los Angeles imagined by Hollywood, the movie version as a fantastical den of iniquity where sultry femme fatales seduced schmucks in Spanish-style mansions. The real deal, where people lived. Cinema verite as it were, purporting the revelation of some truth in turn.

What truth here is all in the image. We can cobble together a view of the historic past but never before the invention of the camera lens did we have the actual thing rich with so much texture and detail, the magical contradiction of living ghosts (people or places).

Come to this not to be a told a story about these people. Ordinary anxieties of the displaced the same as everywhere else, the young and restless with too much time. Come to this to inhabit for a while, to sit around and listen. Compare with what LA we are thrown into 30 years later in Falling Down.

In the extras of the pristine restoration conducted by the UCLA, we find a 1956 student short about Bunker Hill, the neighborhood depicted. It's perhaps even better than the actual film. Interviewed are actual residents as we see footage of day-to-day lives, old men all about to be swept aside with their old world. They like to watch the public works constructed in the area, the ones will eventually push them out.

This is a film that certainly won't appeal to the average person. However, despite this, it is an interesting and important film. The movie began as a school project at USC and eventually resulted in this small-time picture. It's about a group of displaced American-Indians who are living in Los Angelese. Unfortunately, their sense of purpose and work ethic have become lost in the transition from the reservation. This film documents a 24-hour stretch in their rather purposeless lives. As a piece of history and commentary it's very important stuff, though it's also the type stuff that is dreadfully dry. Seeing people going about their lives as you hear voice-overs and see dialog crudely inserted (it almost never matched the lip movements of the characters and was sloppy) becomes a bit of a drag after a while. A noble fictionalized documentary but one for which you really have to have a lot of patience in order to enjoy.