The Exiles (1963)
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Newcomb
Director: Kent MacKenzie
Writer: Kent MacKenzie
Cinematographers: Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, John Arthur Morrill
Cast: Mary Donahue, Homer Nish, Clydean Parker
Running Time: 72 min
A haunting study of identity, estrangement, and anomie, Kent MacKenzie’s debut feature The Exiles has been all but “exiled” from American audiences since its completion in 1961. Recently rediscovered and restored by the UCLA Film Archives, The Exiles received its first true theatrical release in the summer of 2008, garnering critical acclaim as a lost American masterpiece.
Placing his story at the crossroads of fiction, documentary, and ethnography, MacKenzie chronicles a Friday night in the lives of a handful of Native Americans in a seedy Los Angeles neighborhood. The film culminates in an unforgettable early-morning powwow on the outskirts of the city, as the various protagonists attempt to reassert their cultural heritage. MacKenzie’s use of nonprofessional actors and his unflinching look at racism have invited comparisons with more widely known works of independent cinema, including John Cassavetes’s Shadows and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, yet The Exiles has a contemplative mood of its own, as it reveals a time and place lost to history.
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times describes it as “a welcome act of defiant remembrance,” while Armond White, writing in the New York Press, calls The Exiles “a classic American story of aspiration and tragedy … beautiful and devastating.” With crisp black-and-white photography and a guttural rock-and-roll soundtrack by The Revels (also featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), The Exiles has lost none of its power over its 47-year absence.
