Kent Mackenzie's 1961 movie 'The Exiles' was so revolutionary that even now it seems gutsy.
The Exiles (1961)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:27
Rotten:3
Average Rating:7.9/10
Consensus: An historic film, The Exiles combines the realism of social consciousness films with the loosely spun narrative of improvisational features to tell the true story of Native Americans adrift in a derelict neighborhood in Los Angeles, 1960.
Rated: Not Rated
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Jul 11, 2008 Limited
Synopsis:
Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is an incredible feature film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native...
Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is an incredible feature film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski. The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects.
The film features Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds. The film shares a curious number of surface similarities with Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep: they were both gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized Los Angeles communities made within about a decade from each other by young filmmakers who were both compared to John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica, they both have existed for decades without theatrical release, they both have been featured in Thom Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself, they both have been restored by Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archives and they both are Milestone Film & Video releases.
One of the significant distinctions between The Exiles and Killer of Sheep is that MacKenzie (unlike Burnett) was a definitive outsider to the community he was filming--he was a well-to-do white man from the East coast amongst Native Americans, Mexicans and Filipinos in a low-income L.A. community. Regardless, his sensitivity and his genuinely penetrating interest in attempting to understand the people in his film via filming them shines through (he, like Burnett, involved the stars of the film in the writing and filming process), curbing the tendencies towards sentimentalism and fetishization that often emerge in attempts to represent "the other." Despite (or because of) the fact that no other films at the time were (and still very few now are) depicting Native American peoples (aside from the overblown stereotypes in Westerns) let alone urban Native Americans, The Exiles could not find a distributor willing to risk putting it out theatrically, and so over the years it fell into obscurity, known and loved by cinephiles and admired for its originality and honesty by such Native American filmmakers as Chris Eyres (Smoke Signals, 1998) and Ben-alex Dupris (experimental filmmaker and writer) but remaining largely unseen to the public, including communities like the ones depicted in the film. The 2008 theatrical release will provide the opportunity to redeem this fact. --© Milestone Films
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Starring: Mary Donahue, Homer Nish, Clydean Parker, Tom Reynolds
Starring: Mary Donahue, Homer Nish, Clydean Parker, Tom Reynolds, Rico Rodriguez, Clifford Ray Sam, Eddie Sunrise, Yvonne Williams
Director: Kent MacKenzie
Director: Kent MacKenzie
Studio: Milestone Films
Reviews for The Exiles
It's an essential film that hardly anyone saw upon its release in 1961.
For its beautiful black-and-white aesthetics, docudrama realism, and, sadly, still fresh portrait of off-reservation Native Americans, an excellent rediscovery
The amateur actors, many of whom in reality met sad ends on those same streets, are utterly convincing. You have the sense again and again that you've unearthed a time capsule -- a sensation that cinema alone of all the arts can impart.
The Exiles ... presents one boozy night in the lives of Homer, Cliff, Tommy and Yvonne, from a convertible joy ride through the Third Street Tunnel, to an early-morning powwow.
Mackenzie imposes no obvious attitude or mediating outsider's perspective on the material; he just presents it to us, a snapshot of an otherwise unknown culture, with details specific to its time and place.
Kent Mackenzie's magnificent, long-undistributed, unclassifiable first feature, The Exiles, stands as a rare consideration of the inner and outer lives of American Indians in a big American city.
Just because a movie was lost and found doesn't mean it's worth your $8.75.
Rife with astonishing black-and-white images of an unknown L.A. and clashing sounds of bars, cinemas and poker games, The Exiles is one of those movies that functions as both artifact and fresh discovery.
Its moving portraiture is refreshingly free of cliches and moralizing platitudes, and the high-contrast black-and-white photography and dense, highly creative sound track are equally impressive.
The Exiles is a vivid portrait of Native American culture. Even more astonishing is the fact the movie is more than 40 years old.
A cinéma vérité look at the rootless Native American community that once upon a time lived in Bunker Hill and hung out in downtown bars such as Club Ritz, this Kent Mackenzie film is a brooding picture of a darkly beautiful, long-gone Los Angeles.
The movie has an undeniable emotional punch and its historical place in cinema is undisputable (there's still nothing else quite like it).
A ghostly and startling tale of Native Americans in Los Angeles -- a fusion of documentary and fiction -- in the late '50s. Never previously released, it's a revelation.
Best if approached as a nostalgic curiosity shot a half century ago rather than as a conventional flick offering a satisfying cinematic experience.
You can only brood on the near half-century since The Exiles was shot -- and be grateful that someone went to that place and captured it all.
Director Brent MacKenzie's black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick's "The Savage Eye" (1960).
While the mood is spot-on, the dubbed dialogue is so persistently lousy that it besmirches the proceedings' otherwise-entrancing beauty.
Latest News for The Exiles
July 21, 2008:
Docudrama from Fifties captures Indians partying in L.A. ![]()
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| 91% 91% | The White Ribbon | 12/30 |
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