Indie Feature Vividly Documents Culture, Neighborhood, Daily Life

While the latest Hollywood hits and a few token classic films are coming out on BluRay, there are still important films making their home video debut exclusively on DVD. One of last year’s surprise hits on the art-film/revival house circuit was the first theatrical release of the acclaimed docudrama, “The Exiles,” a gritty and unsentimental portrait of one typical night in the lives of several Native Americans who had moved from their reservations to a low-income neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Writer-producer-director and USC film school graduate Kent Mackenzie had a documentary background, but disliked the films he saw documenting social issues that were either too romanticized or too politicized to convey a more objective truth. He also rejected the standard Hollywood-style dramatic narrative movies that focused on characters solving problems and achieving goals with a convenient resolution by the end.

After befriending a group of American Indians in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, he convinced them to play themselves and tell their own stories on the screen by re-enacting their daily lives for the camera, instead of the typical documentary approach of interviews or narration over newsreel-type footage. Mackenzie did interview them, however, but used the material to design a script that they all rehearsed and filmed, with portions of the interviews later used as voice-over interior monologues.

The result is a dramatic “slice of life” film with amazingly naturalistic performances in a free-flowing narrative structure, filmed on actual locations in the style of a documentary. The lack of a traditional action and event-based plot, without the usual conflict-crisis-resolution formula or artfully developed characterizations, gives the effect of following these people around for a night of bar-hopping and partying, getting an idea of their lifestyle, without really getting a clear handle on their motivations.

The strongest characterization and closest thing to a leading character, again highly atypical for the situation, is Yvonne, the pregnant girlfriend of one of the men. Rather than presenting a coherent story, the film conveys more a sense of aimlessness, emptiness, and loneliness, and the feeling that the next day and week and year will not be much different.

One of the most surprising aspects of the film is that it was shot a half-century ago, from 1958 through 1961, but had been all but unseen and virtually forgotten for over 40 years. Although in the early 1960s it played a number of film festivals around the world to great acclaim, potential distributors felt its approach as much as its content made it unmarketable, so it never got a theatrical release and had only spotty nontheatrical distribution on 16mm film in the late 60s and poor video copies in the 70s.

Then a couple of years ago Milestone Film and Video arranged to have the “The Exiles” restored from its original 35mm negative and sound recordings for its first-ever theatrical release in the summer of 2008, with the participation of noted Native American writer Sherman Alexie and African-American independent filmmaker Charles Burnett. The company expected that a few months in selected theatres would help promote a video release later that year, but instead the critical and audience response was so favorable that the film kept getting additional theatrical bookings for more than a year.

Finally, last week Milestone released “The Exiles” to DVD with a beautiful transfer of its striking black-and-white cinematography and a generous selection of bonus materials overflowing onto a second disc. There are several short films including four documentaries from the 1950s-60s by the late Kent Mackenzie (who died at age 50 in 1980), as well as an effective new documentary on the city’s urban renewal process that destroyed the close-knit neighborhood where “The Exiles” was filmed.

There is an enthusiastic and fascinating audio commentary by author Sherman Alexie with critic Sean Axmaker, and very informative audio recordings of comments and a panel discussion made at the film’s premiere. Not only that, but the second disc contains 229 MB worth of pdf files that reproduce scripts, press materials, brochures, the director’s resume, and the 165-page Master’s Thesis that Mackenzie wrote describing the concept and production of “The Exiles.”

The enduring strength of “The Exiles” is not only its vivid documentation of a particular period of time in a vanished neighborhood, or its realistic depiction of “expatriate” Native Americans who have become immigrants in a culture foreign to them. It is also the fact that the lifestyle, experiences and attitudes depicted are very much with us today and far from exclusive to any one ethnic group or geographic location.

If you can’t find the DVD of “The Exiles” in stores, it can be ordered directly from the distributor at http://www.milestonefilms.com.

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