The Exiles
Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of 
Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. 
But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.
Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of 
Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. 
But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.
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