Displaced and Adrift in Los Angeles

“THE Exiles,” a film about American Indians living on the edge of downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s, is both a chronicle and a casualty of neglect: a movie about a forsaken community that itself became a lost object. Directed by Kent Mackenzie, a first-time filmmaker who had just graduated from the University of Southern California, it is a poetic and empathetic hybrid of fiction and documentary. The nonprofessional actors play versions of themselves: young Indians, newly relocated from reservations and adrift in working-class Bunker Hill.
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Milestone Films
A scene from Kent Mackenzie’s “Exiles” (1961), about American Indians in Los Angeles. Shot over three years, the film, opening in New York on Friday, mixes documentary and fiction in the Robert Flaherty tradition.
“The Exiles” was shown at the Venice International Film Festival in 1961 and won plaudits (from Pauline Kael, among others) during its brief run on the festival circuit. But it quickly faded from view, as did Mr. Mackenzie, who directed only one other feature, “Saturday Morning” (1970), and died, at 50, in 1980.
The revival of interest in “The Exiles,” which opens in New York with a restored print on Friday, dates to its inclusion in “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a 2003 video essay by Thom Andersen about movie depictions of Los Angeles. Devoted largely to debunking misrepresentations of the city, Mr. Andersen’s film also called attention to a forgotten local tradition of underdog, neo-realist cinema that included “The Exiles” and Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep.”
Like “Killer of Sheep” (1977), which had its theatrical release last year to widespread praise and considerable success, “The Exiles” was restored by the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is being released by Milestone, the boutique distributor that has made a specialty of salvaging lost classics. Seen today, Mr. Mackenzie’s film appears to uncover a history not so much secret as occluded: a subculture and a way of life that has been virtually invisible.
Filmed on nights and weekends, it took three years to complete. “It was designed to be shot in eight weeks, but we kept running out of money,” said John Morrill, one of the cinematographers. (It was Mr. Morrill who located the original negative of “The Exiles” at U.S.C., where he taught cinematography.) The production was also delayed when cast members were arrested and Mr. Morrill and Erik Daarstad, another cinematographer, were drafted.
Mr. Morrill said “The Exiles” was an attempt to return documentary to the tradition of Robert Flaherty, whose films incorporated staged elements, and Humphrey Jennings, whose dramatized documentary about the London blitz, “Fires Were Started,” was a major influence. “We never thought documentaries had to be newsreels, and we didn’t have any compunction about using narrative techniques,” Mr. Morrill said.
“The Exiles” follows a group of urban American Indians over a 12-hour period from dusk to dawn. While the main female character wanders the streets alone, her husband and his buddies, awash in booze, look for trouble and a good time, drifting from bar to liquor store to dance hall. The night ends high in the hills above the city lights, as the soundtrack’s jukebox rock ’n’ roll gives way to ceremonial chanting and drumming.
Mr. Mackenzie prepared for the shoot by hanging out with the residents of Bunker Hill he had befriended and from whom the cast was drawn. “He spent a year and a half researching, and he just sat with them night after night after night,” Mr. Morrill said. “There was never any script.”
A portrait of a vanished community, “The Exiles” retains a contemporary relevance. “Seventy percent of Natives live in urban areas now,” said Sherman Alexie, the American Indian novelist and filmmaker who is helping Milestone present “The Exiles.” “We might have better jobs or be college educated, but the struggle to maintain your Native identity in a city is the primary struggle today.”
In focusing on the first wave of Indians relocated in the 1950s by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “The Exiles” documents a displacement that Mr. Alexie says has received scant notice from a younger generation of Indians. “None of us made that movie,” he said. “Nobody writes about the relocated anymore. In a sense that first generation has been abandoned even by other Natives.” He added: “They were the immigrants, and by and large everybody in America loves to pretend they’ve always been here, even the people who’ve always been here. Ignoring the first generation of immigrants makes you feel like you’ve always belonged.”
Despite its compact time frame the film conjures a powerful sensation of purgatory: a night like many others. As one of the characters says, pondering the threat of a jail sentence: “Time is just time to me. If I’m doing it outside I can do it inside.”
“It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ for the relocated,” Mr. Alexie said. “That feeling of repetition makes it feel like a ceremony. The thing about poverty is that it’s relentless and the film’s not afraid of that.”
“The Exiles” is attuned equally to everyday moments of tenderness and to the brutal toll of alcoholism and family neglect, apparently to the discomfort of some viewers. “Whenever I showed it to my students, they would attack me for making a stereotyped film about drunken Indians,” Mr. Morrill said.
But Mr. Alexie said the movie’s harshness felt true to life. “This was before the political revolutions of the late ’60s and before Native pride,” he said. “The dominant mode for Natives was shame.”
He added: “It’s a little problematic in that it’s a white guy’s movie about us. But in learning how the film was made, I think people will discover it was truly collaborative. The filmmakers ended up in the position of witness as much as creator.”