
Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film, The Exiles, was met with universal acclaim when it was re-released last year. And rightly so: UCLA’s restoration is breathtaking, and the film itself is an important test case against the increasingly sanitized state of American independent film. But in the rush to claim the film as a lost classic, I wonder if we haven’t overlooked the fissures and gaps that make it so modern. When a film is said to be “ahead of its time,” we must be on guard that we’re not applauding a critic’s self-congratulations. After watching the film several times these last couple of years, in several frames of mind, The Exiles has become a locus work for me—the kind that attracts comparison with innumerable, seemingly disparate modes of cinematic address without fully adhering to any one. The film’s disjointedness is as much a matter of history as style; its unorthodoxy lies in its reorientation of cinematic taxonomies.
Milestone’s superb DVD package substantiates a multifaceted, fragmentary view of the film. This is especially thanks to the crucial additions of Bunker Hill, the short documentary subject Mackenzie made in advance of The Exiles (a documentary map of the fiction to come), as well as Mackenzie’s USC master’s thesis, a kind of lab report on The Exiles. The thesis is an unusual document, tracing the film’s history in terms of its practical and intellectual challenges. This reflective work helps situate The Exiles as urban ethnography.
I’m writing an extended essay about the film’s melancholy mood, specifically the way its realism is purchased with emotional affect (from the Mackenzie thesis: “Some of us even felt that there might be a direct relationship between the amount of realism in a given film and the empathy which an audience would feel for it”). In the meantime, I’m collecting a few notes on the film here, in the hopes you might be motivated to check out Milestone’s DVD.
Firstly, the film is haunted: a grainy present-tense account shadowed by specters of past and future, each redoubling Main Street’s contingency and drift. In terms of cinema/photographic history—one of several histories the film takes up, along with Native American displacement and urban planning—the film is almost irresistibly prescient (it’s significant to note that the rediscovery was in large part prompted by its screen time in another film, Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself). The premonitory power of Mackenzie’s designs can be quite specific: a recessional tracking shot down the length of a rowdy bar snatches rock and roll cool and urban provincialism twelve years ahead of schedule (Mean Streets). The broader “lost classic” appeal hinged on the film’s being a precursor of modern American independent cinema, helping to explain the frequent invocation of Shadows. Other reviews were more specific still, citing Mackenzie as a homegrown neorealist (here’s where comparisons with Killer of Sheep float in) and operating with some of the same observational principles of Direct Cinema (though Mackenzie didn’t enjoy the lightweight sync sound technology these filmmakers relied upon—it’s evident from the thesis that he wishes he had this equipment , even if his strange non-sync solutions seem integral to the film’s multivalence). Other critics went so far as to posit a link between The Exiles’ looping lyricism with contemporary documentary hybridists, i.e. the Jia/Costa/Weerasethakul crowd (local programmer Chi-hui Yang presented an early screening of the restoration at the 2008 Flaherty Seminar, where Costa was a guest).
I want to address some of these “back to the future” through lines, but it’s important to note that Mackenzie, a student filmmaker, placed his film in view of the past. (Again, I will be writing about the film in terms of film/photographic history, but insofar as The Exiles is haunted, that clearly has much to do with the historical trauma shadowing each character’s experience). Mackenzie lists influences in his thesis: some are obvious enough (The Bicycle Thief, Song of Ceylon, Rain, L’Atalante), but others are surprising (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Place in the Sun) or now obscure (Mille Miglia, The Back of Beyond). There is a photographic lineage here too, of nighthawk street photographers (Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans) and Edward Weston’s famous portraits of Indians. A few of these latter compositions are shown in the film’s introduction; we transition directly from these to stills of Mackenzie’s players, indicating a shift in both Indian culture and representation.
The crucial figure here, however, is Robert Flaherty. Mackenzie cites Nanook of the North, Moana and Louisiana Story in the thesis, and more broadly uses Flaherty’s same language of discovery and the necessity of poetic license in documentary realism (one thinks of John Grierson’s famous, seemingly nonsensical definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality”). In his excellent Cineaste essay, Robert Koehler discusses The Exiles as having “a ghost of itself” in Mackenzie’s earlier Bunker Hill. This palimpsestic story of a film production echoes Flaherty’s own pilgrim’s progress with Nanook. In the opening titles of the film, Flaherty reflects about his own drafting process: “I had just completed editing the film in Toronto when the negative caught fire and I was minus all. The editing print, however, was not burned and was shown several times—just long enough to make me realize it was no good. But I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while.” That “typify” makes us flinch, but Flaherty’s statement remains a foundational myth of filmmaking.
Certainly, there are significant differences between Mackenzie’s film of American Indians and Flaherty’s of the Inuit. For one, Flaherty absents Nanook of modernity—e.g. the infamous phonograph scene; Flaherty’s refusing the admission of rifles—paradoxically filming the Inuit in an imaginary pre-contact space. Mackenzie’s focus on urban Native Americans looks beyond the primitive/civilization binary. Indeed, Nanook’s phonograph scene might profitably be compared to the mobile soundtrack (jukeboxes and radios, constantly) of The Exiles’ night out. This soundtrack is crucial to the way Mackenzie troubles the social problem film—i.e. the kind in which liberal pieties require a different class to be one thing or another (typically saint or criminal), but never just to have a good time.
This implicit critique of Hollywood’s patronizing (at best) approach to minorities is an important benchmark for American independent film. Another—and another distinction from Flaherty—is Mackenzie’s direction of non-actors to locate character in gesture and intonation more than broad mugging or emblematic diction. There is again much material evidence from Mackenzie’s thesis that this concern for texture and gesture occupied the entire production of the film. We often speak of independent cinema’s tendency towards the “low key” as an effect rather than a dramaturgical design, but The Exiles underscores the poetic lengths of authenticity. It’s also worth noting that acting is one of the ways Mackenzie perhaps anticipates the durational strategies of later filmmaker from Warhol to Costa. Though The Exiles is largely comprised of short takes by necessity—the crew filmed on leftover ends of celluloid—Mackenzie pines for the long take in his thesis: “As we worked on the film, we began to find that the shorter a scene was, the worse the acting would be. The longer a scene was allowed to run, the more the Indians would get into the mood and forget themselves in front of the camera.”

The emotional significance invested in gestures and objects also lassos the neorealism angle. The term is often flattened into shorthand for location shooting, a slice of life narration and focus on the working class. Mackenzie was certainly impressed by the early neorealist classics, but the existential texture of The Exiles is in accord with the formalist (and contemporaneous) rethinking of neorealism in films by Antonioni, Olmi, Pasolini, etc. In his wonderful book Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Jeffrey Skoller makes a similar point about the potentially misleading invocations of a “spontaneous” neorealism in reviews of Killer of Sheep. “While the film is located specifically in South Central Los Angeles, in the present day,” Skoller writes, “the highly formalized rhythms render the place and time slightly unfamiliar and ephemeral”—a tendency Skoller persuasively argues is closer to L’eclisse than The Bicycle Thief. Whereas the early neorealist films are “about” a given subject, Mackenzie’s form comes closer to the free indirect style in literature. Here is James Wood on that subject: “Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.” Accordingly, the provisional form of The Exiles—especially the non-sync sound, but also the jag of scenes, the Hopper-worthy compositions of urban loneliness—is conversant with the characters’ hand-to-mouth existence.
Ethnography and realism converge on questions of representation. Insofar as The Exiles moves away from Flaherty’s traditional ethnographic mode towards something more like an imaginary or auto-ethnography, its technique is complimentary to Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s crucial portrait of a documentary, Chronicle of a Summer (from, you guessed it, 1961). Midway through his thesis, Mackenzie writes, “During this whole period, there was another question constantly under discussion which I don’t think we were ever really able to answer completely successfully. Was this primarily a film about Indian Problems or was it an existential film about the lives of some individuals?” This question strikes me as the heart of what makes The Exiles so modern. That doubt is something new; what’s more, it persists.
















