Streaming: The Exiles

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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,

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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 USC and it was first threatened with demolition. He also became fascinated with a subculture of Arizona Indians living there, and made them the subject of a semi-documentary short feature he called The Exiles. Filming in 35mm, Mackenzie wasn’t able to record dialogue on location, so he relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voiceovers to tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn. It is a night full of loneliness and yearning, petty betrayals and disappointments, and little flashes of happiness, ending with an attempt to revive old ceremonies and solidarities on a hilltop above the city. The Exiles is a wrenching document of cultural dislocation and a remarkable record of a city that has vanished.

Thom Andersen
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Kent Mackenzie
Cinematographer
  • Erik Daarstad
  • Robert Kaufman
  • John Morrill
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital streaming
  • 72 mins
Source
  • Milestone Films