11/14/2022
Presents
Thursday 11/17/22
Showtime at 7:30pm
Kress Annex open
6-9pm
THE EXILES (1961)
by Kent Mackenzie
exhibited on 16mm film
THE EXILES chronicles one night in the lives of young Native American men and women living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows a group of exiles — transplants from Southwest reservations — as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance.
"MIRACULOUS...the night photography alone would make the film immortal."
—Richard Brody - THE NEW YORKER
"Mackenzie's sparkling, moody black-and-white images of what might be called the Native American Diaspora... depict a classic American story of aspiration and tragedy. It is beautiful and devastating."
—Armond White - NEW YORK PRESS
A detailed history of THE EXILES by Milestone Films upon their 2008 re-release :
Kent Mackenzie first conceived of The Exiles during the making of his short student film Bunker Hill–1956 while a student at the University of Southern California. In March 1956 he read an article by Dorothy Van de Mark in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Raid on the Reservations” about government attempts to obtain Indian land. Mackenzie traveled to Arizona, visited some of the reservations there, and decided to document an Apache’s relocation to Los Angeles.
In making The Exiles, Mackenzie wrote, “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.’ I had seen many of the so-called ‘ash-can’ documentaries in which the squalor and horror of poverty were emphasized to the exclusion of all else, and I hoped that I wouldn’t superimpose any such illusions on these people. I wanted to show their own point of view in the film if I could.”
By the late 1970s, The Exiles was shown mostly on poor quality video for occasional classroom screenings. Sadly, Kent Mackenzie died in 1980, largely forgotten by the film world.
The screening of our 16mm print is licensed through Kino Lorber for one theatrical screening.
