L.A. Story

Kent McKenzie's The Exiles

by Sam Adams

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Thom Andersen's found-footage essay Los Angeles Plays Itself may be forever trapped in copyright hell, but he can claim credit for helping to revive two overlooked landmarks of Angelino cinema. The first was Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, and the second, and less well-known, is Kent McKenzie's 1961 exploration of life in Los Angeles' American Indian community, The Exiles. (Both films were restored by the UCLA Archives, and released by Milestone Films.)

McKenzie's story is set in Bunker Hill, a worn-down neighborhood memorialized in John Fante's novels and later flattened by urban redevelopment. As McKenzie shoots it, it's a place of harsh reality and stark beauty, its shadows heightened by the film's incandescent black-and-white photography. (The stop-and-go production used three cinematographers, but Erik Daarstad was responsible for much of the shooting.) As he follows a handful of characters through a single night and early morning, McKenzie uses shots of funicular railroad cars ascending and descending the steep slope that gave the area its name, gliding silently up and down in the darkness, the lights in their windows burning.

McKenzie considered The Exiles a documentary, but even by pre-cinema verité standards, the term is a stretch. McKenzie used nonprofessional actors, and his three leads, Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish and Tommy Reynolds, go by their own surnames in the film. But the situations are invented, and it's clear that the three of them are acting, if not always convincingly. But McKenzie doesn't ask them to do more than they're capable of. The film doesn't interject fake conflicts into their lives to make them more interesting. The closest we come to drama is the submerged tension between downcast doormat Yvonne and her husband, Homer, a self-styled playboy who drops his wife at the movies before hitting the bars with his sidekick, Tommy.

Perhaps unexpectedly, McKenzie doesn't make much, at least explicitly, of his protagonists' background. Apart from a prologue which uses still photos and native chants to the story of the Indians' migration from reservations to the city, he lets their environment do the talking. There's a poignant moment where he cuts from Tommy reading a letter from home, to his parents, sitting on the baked earth in front of their wooden shack, but otherwise the movie confines itself to the characters' immediate surroundings. The film conveys a strong and almost overpowering sense of place which comes very close to transporting you back through time. Andersen had it right. The most vivid character in The Exiles is Los Angeles itself.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Exiles | Directed by Kent McKenzie | A Milestone Films release

Wed., Feb. 18, 7:30 p.m., Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-527-9898, brynmawrfilm.org