The Exiles

The Exiles by Kent Mackenzie, USA (Documentary). A 1961 documentary chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in LA.

A unique and powerful film, blending storytelling with documentation. Mackenzie constructed a narrative about one day in the life of three main characters - a pregnant young woman (Yvonne), the father (Homer), and a man about town (Tommy). Both men are profound alcoholics, and the woman seems stunned by the circumstances of her life though hopeful for the future of her child.

The film opens with portraits from Edward Sheriff Curtis's monumental North American Indian, which I recommend as a starting place. Mackenzie has a sharp eye for cultural details - check out the Grand Hotel mattress in Yvonne and Homer's apartment, as well as the magazines, comics, advertisements, toys, and street scenes.

The story develops via voiceovers by Yvonne, Homer, and Tommy - and an amazing middle sequence from the rez, with generous doses of native language and music.

This is a must-see movie for anyone interested in social work, indigenous peoples, or the dark side of American culture. Never boring for any viewer.

Kent Mackenzie, USC Filmmaker, follows one 24 hr day of a native american couple and their friends in downtown Los Angeles, CA on & near Bunker Hill. With flashbacks to reservation life, the pathos of the "non-BIA approved" urban Indian life of poverty and utter hopelessness will move you beyond mere words. Homer & Yvonne are expecting a child - he is distant and lost, she abjectly passive and accepting of her fate. Absolutely real and so personal you may cry, knowing that nothing is going to get any better, and wishing that you could reach across time to make it different. Their child will be born in 1961-2 and is now age 40 if s/he survived.

Kent also made a film, "Bunker Hill" which followed an aged Doctor on his visits to patient's homes located on Bunker Hill area in Los Angeles where Homer & Yvonne lived. Scenes of Angel's Flight and old victorian buildings are in both films. Lost times and places now covered with corporate headquarters. Two American Tragedies.

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.

Astonishing slice of cinema verite at a time when young filmmakers were trying to break the Hollywood habit in favor of the real world. The 70 minutes are not entertaining; however, they do fascinate. It's a nighttime of boozing carousal for several young Indian men amid the neon jungle of downtown LA. The camera tracks their aimless wanderings and endless drinking from one seedy venue to the next. It's LA like you've seldom seen it—a down-and-outers look at unvarnished urban decay. The faces too are fascinating, not like the usual Hollywood Indian or crowd scene extras.

It's a disturbing look, slow to accumulate until the poignant final shot. These are truly lost people, caught between two incomplete worlds-- the urban jungle of the white man and the captive reservation of the Indian. The men seem to treat most everything as a joke, perhaps a way of denying the dead-end reality of their lives. Ironically, they appear now to be strangers in their own land. It's the young Indian woman Yvonne, however, who's likely to evoke audience sympathy. It's she who dreams (her inner thoughts vocalized in voice-over) of a family and something like a normal life. But, the men in her life are truly lost, so her hopes appear doomed as well. Seeing this document may help viewers better understand the controversial American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970's.

Apparently, the project spanned several years of interrupted funding. Thus, the film has to be an artistic commitment of a high order on the part of filmmaker MacKenzie. Did he hope for a commercial release. A story and technique like this would seem to hold little promise of that. Did he hope for art house distribution and an appeal to the intelligentsia. Whatever the motivation, he's produced a document of lasting social value, and thanks be to TMC for bringing MacKenzie's achievement to today's audiences

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.