[bomp] FW: Re: "The Exiles" - long lost movie returns, Revels soundtrack

["Matt Benz" <mbenz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Salon.com:

>
> In the late 1950s, a USC filmmaking student named Kent Mackenzie began
> hanging out with the community of young American Indians in the
> neighborhood of Bunker Hill, just north of downtown Los Angeles. Most
of
> these young people had recently moved from the Indian reservations of
> the southwestern United States, becoming part of a massive urban
> relocation of the Native American population that would be much
> discussed by later sociologists, but was hardly noticed at the time.
> "The Exiles," the black-and-white feature film Mackenzie made on the
> streets of L.A. between 1958 and 1960 with a group of Indians he knew,
> is an awkward, somewhat dated blend of fiction and documentary -- but
> it's also an astonishing, heartbreaking viewing experience and, in its
> new release from Milestone Films, a major work of restoration and
> rediscovery.
>
>
>
> Mackenzie's script was based on the personal experiences of Yvonne
> Williams, Homer Nish and Tommy Reynolds, the film's subjects and/or
> actors, and recorded interviews with the cast are used as voiceover
> narration explaining each character's thoughts. There are episodes,
but
> by design nothing close to a conventional plot: Beefy Homer and
> ne'er-do-well Tommy dump Yvonne -- who is pregnant with Homer's child
> and yearns for a settled domestic existence -- at a downtown movie
> theater, then head out for a long night of drinking, gambling and
> womanizing, followed by an amazing predawn party sequence on a
> trash-strewn hilltop, featuring both Thunderbird wine and tribal songs
> and dances. You get the feeling it's not a new pattern, and that it's
> likely to be repeated the next night and the one after that.
>
>
>
> There's no editorializing or explicit social commentary in "The
Exiles,"
> with the possible exception of a scene in which Homer stands in front
of
> a liquor store on Hill Street reading a letter from his parents back
on
> the "rez" in Valentine, Ariz., and imagines a bucolic scene there.
> (Again, this is meant to convey Homer's point of view, not the
> director's.) You can certainly argue that these characters' lives of
> dead-broke hedonism, skating from one beer and one dollar to the next
> one, reflect a legacy of profound cultural defeat and economic
> oppression. But it's not at all clear that they see it that way, and
> Mackenzie doesn't necessarily either.
>
>
>
> Like his contemporaries Cassavetes, Truffaut and Godard (whose work he
> may or may not have seen), Mackenzie is pursuing subjective human
> experience, not intellectual analysis, and his extraordinary
> shot-sequences -- like the giddy, drunken, hair-raising drive through
a
> tunnel in a top-down convertible -- address issues of signification
more
> than anything I could say about the film. It's worth adding that the
> terrific original garage-rock score is by an L.A. band called the
> Revels, whose song "Comanche" appears both here and in "Pulp Fiction,"
a
> movie unquestionably influenced by this one. If the stagey, docudrama
> quality of "The Exiles" takes time to get used to, as does the odd,
> artificial "post-sync" sound -- nearly all the dialogue was recorded
in
> a studio, after the fact, as in many European films of the period --
the
> startling naturalism of the images still wins out.
>
>
>
> Along with capturing a vanished era of Indian urban subculture that
> mainstream America knew nothing about and cared even less, Mackenzie's
> miraculous black-and-white images (as lovingly restored by Ross Lipman
> at the UCLA Film & Television Archive) literally capture a vanished
> physical landscape, from the predominantly Indian dive bars and
> grindhouse movie theaters of Main Street to the Angels Flight tramway
> and decaying Victorian rooming houses of Bunker Hill (memorably used
as
> a location in Robert Aldrich's 1955 noir "Kiss Me Deadly" and other
> period films). Although the neighborhood technically still exists --
> it's now the skyscraper district of downtown L.A., in fact -- every
> building seen in "The Exiles" is gone today, the hill itself has been
> flattened and the Angels Flight railway, reconstructed nearby as a
> tourist attraction, has been shut down since 2001.
>
>
>
> Inspired both by early documentary filmmakers like Robert Flaherty and
> Humphrey Jennings and by the social realism of Jean Renoir and
Vittorio
> de Sica, Mackenzie strove to capture his subjects' lives in all their
> complexity, without pitying or exoticizing them. "I tried very hard
not
> to be attracted by the strangeness of the environment as opposed to my
> own, and to avoid the 'romance of poverty,'" he wrote. He intended
"The
> Exiles" as an "anti-theatrical" and "anti-social-documentary" film,
> which would pose problems for the viewer it did not resolve. Given
that
> it has never had a commercial, theatrical engagement in the past 47
> years, I suppose he succeeded a little too well.
>
>
>
> There's entirely too much synchronicity to the story of "The Exiles,"
in
> fact: It's a forgotten movie about a forgotten people, made in a
> forgotten neighborhood by a forgotten director. Despite premiering at
> the Venice and San Francisco film festivals (and playing the
first-ever
> New York Film Festival in 1964), the picture never found theatrical
> distribution and for decades was available only in 16mm and patchy VHS
> classroom versions. Mackenzie died in 1980, after making only two more
> films (one of them a 1965 TV special called "The Teenage Revolution,"
> narrated by Van Heflin). By any objective measure, he was a failure as
a
> filmmaker. But in the secret, unwritten history of alternative
American
> culture he stands as a hero, alongside the Indians of Bunker Hill and
> the generations before them.
>
>
>
> "The Exiles" opens July 11 at the IFC Center in New York, with other
> cities and DVD release to follow.

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