The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie
United States, 1961

35mm Archival Print

  • Introduction
    May HaDuong

    May HaDuong is the Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

This film’s lower-case urban poetry suggests a major talent. . . . It’s refreshingly free of cliches and platitudes.

—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
featuring

Homer Nish, Tom Reynolds, Yvonne Williams,

Kent Mackenzie discovered Bunker Hill, the low-rent residential neighborhood on the west edge of downtown Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s, when he was a film student at the University of Southern California and the neighborhood was first threatened with demolition. He became fascinated with a subculture of Arizona Indians living there and made them the subject of the semidocumentary short feature The Exiles. Filming in 35mm, Mackenzie wasn’t able to record dialogue on location, so he relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voice-overs to tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn.

Thom Andersen
FILM DETAILS 
Cinematographer
  • Erik Daarstad
  • Robert Kaufman
  • John Morrill
Print Info
  • Color
  • 35mm
  • 72 mins
Source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Permission
  • Kino Lorber
Preceded By

1936 Feb 10—“Promised Land” Barred to Hoboes

United States, 1936

Southern California closes its borders to the penniless and starts a big controversy.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 2 mins
source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Additional Info
  • Hearst Metrotone Newsreel

1955 Sept 16—Los Angeles Seeks Remedy as Record Smog Covers City

United States, 1955

Shrouded by the worst blanket of smog in its history, the California city studies methods to avert a disaster. A careful record of ozone density is kept as the danger mounts.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 1 mins
source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Additional Info
  • Hearst Metrotone Newsreel

1963 Dec 7—Watery Disaster: Dam Bursts in Los Angeles

United States, 1963

Los Angeles’s worst disaster in thirty years strikes when the Baldwin Hills Reservoir cracks with a loud roar and, in seventy-seven minutes, empties nearly three hundred million gallons of water onto an expensive residential area.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 3 mins
source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Additional Info
  • Hearst Metrotone Newsreel

1966 Feb 15—Landslides in California

United States, 1966

Spectacular landslides destroy two homes and endanger two others in Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles, in exactly the same place where houses were similarly wrecked in 1959. Ten miles away in Bel Air, mud and rock avalanches cause damage to expensive and uninsurable homes.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 1 mins
source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Additional Info
  • Hearst Metrotone Newsreel

Event Accessibility

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