The Exiles in film registry

'Thriller,' Muppets join classic film registry

By Brett ZongkerMichael Jackson's "Thriller" video, with that unforgettable graveyard dance, will rest among the nation's treasures in the world's largest archive of film, TV and sound recordings.

The 1983 music video directed by John Landis, though still the subject of lawsuits over profits, was one of 25 films to be inducted Wednesday for preservation in the 2009 National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.And:Congress established the registry in 1989, which now totals 525 films. They are selected not as the "best" American films but instead for their enduring importance to U.S. culture.

The library selects films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public and consulting with the National Film Preservation Board.The Library of Congress's description of The Exiles (1961):Released nearly 48 years ago, "The Exiles" remains one of the few non-stereotypical films that honestly depict Native Americans. With the perspective of a true outsider, filmmaker Kent MacKenzie captures the raw essence of a group of 20-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live among the decayed Victorian mansions of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district. MacKenzie’s day-in-the-life narrative pieces together interviews that allow the people in his film to tell their own stories without ascribing artificial sentimentality.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Dances with Wolves in Film Registry and The Best Indian Movies.

Miles does Exiles

Art of The ExilesThis past Friday, artist and skateboard maker Douglas Miles of Apache Skateboards was in town at the Artist Gallery to unveil a new series of pieces inspired by "The Exiles"--Kent Mackenzie's recently re-released 1961 film about the lives of Native Americans in Downtown Los Angeles.

Miles hails from the same Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona as the film's star, and the subject of a recent LA Weekly feature, Yvonne Walker. With the energy generated from the film, Miles is attempting launch a new wave of contemporary native pop art and culture--that's respectful of traditional Indian artistic elements, but isn't bound by them.Comment:  Follow the link to see more of Miles's artwork.

For more on the subject, see The Exiles Skateboards.

Review of The Exiles

I wrote this review back in October, but Indian Country Today didn't publish it until the end of January. Check it out to see if I'm qualified to write reviews for a professional publication.

‘The Exiles’:  an appreciationBy now you may have heard the hype surrounding the film “The Exiles.” How Kent Mackenzie made the 1961 docudrama about displaced Indians before dying prematurely. How the black-and-white film was forgotten, found and restored by UCLA’s Film and Television Archive. How writer Sherman Alexie has championed it as a realistic portrayal of urban Indians.

For once a movie lives up to the hype. “The Exiles” is arguably one of the greatest films ever by or about Native people.Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.

The best year for Native movies (so far)

Since the year 2004 or so, Native-themed cinema has expanded significantly. Instead of four or five movies a year, we've seen 10 or 12 or more. No doubt this is due to Native filmmakers taking the reins themselves and making their own movies.

Not surprisingly, 2007 was the previous record holder, but 2008 just surpassed it. Here are the good, the bad, and the ugly Native-themed films that appeared this year:

Frozen River
Comanche Moon [TV]
Turok Son of Stone [video]
Tkaronto
Older than America
The Ruins
Aztec Rex [TV]
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Moccasin Flats: Redemption [TV]
Before Tomorrow
In a World Created by a Drunken God
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
A Quantum of Solace
Twilight
Justin Time

If you add The Exiles, the 1961 docudrama that was rereleased this year, and the Aboriginal-themed Australia, 2008 looks even better. And with films ranging from Pearl to The Only Good Indian to the five-part We Shall Remain coming up, 2009 should be the best year yet.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.

My film-watching weekend

Saturday night I attended the debut of Creative Spirit's 2008 films: The Migration, Liminality, and Edgar's Journey. Afterward I congratulated James Lujan (Taos Pueblo), the program director, on another successful year. I then interviewed Migizi Pensoneau (Ponca/Ojibwe), writer of Liminality, and Sydney Freeland (Navajo), director of The Migration.

Sunday afternoon I watched The Exiles on DVD. Wow...it was every bit as good as the reviewers have said. I have to give it a 9.0 of 10.

I'm writing articles on both these subjects for Indian Country Today. I'll link to them when they're published in a few weeks. Stay tuned, and have a happy Native American Day!

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.

Films from the dark side

Indian Comics Irregular #174:  Frozen River and The Exiles

The Exiles roundup

A roundup of my postings about the Native docudrama The Exiles.

The Exiles skateboards

From a press release:

APACHE Skateboards X THE EXILESThe stark vision of director Kent Mackenzie's THE EXILES film serves as the template for the (often misunderstood) stark artistic vison(s) of Douglas Miles as he re-creates scenes from the long awaited critically acclaimed film, THE EXILES.

A film ahead of its time, The EXILES (1958-61) captures in gritty film noir tradition, the story of Native Americans in Los Angeles' Bunker Hill District as they struggle to make a life for themselves during the Bureau of Indian Affairs "relocation period".

This was the B.I.A.'s last major attempt at forced integration of Native people into American society.

Using spraypaint, exacto knives and found objects, imagery from The EXILES comes to life via Douglas Miles' singular vision. His guerilla art method provides the backdrop for the collision of two works of art/ artists exploring the so-called native experience. A perfect combination. The results being a one-two punch that builds interest and respect for THE EXILES film, director, music and cast.

Good news about The Exiles?

A correspondent wrote:I have great media news from NY! Have you heard about EXILES?I'm not sure how great the Exiles news is. Sure, it's good to see almost any movie about Indians, and especially a movie about urban Indians. Those of us in the know know that LA County has the largest Indian population of any county in the US. If the movie conveys a hint of that statistic, it's a positive.

But it's not so good to see Indians portrayed as drunks, carousers, layabouts, and thieves. As the negative ArtForum review indicates, that seems to be a problem. How many stereotypes does The Exiles bust and how many does it reinforce?

For more on the subject, see Native Documentaries and News.

New Yorkers on The Exiles

I gather The Exiles, the 1961 docu-drama about LA's urban Indians, is hitting the screens in New York and elsewhere. We've seen a writeup and a trailer and now some reviews:

First, a glowing tribute:

The Exiles:  Soul and the City

The 1961 'lost' classic gets its long overdue theatrical debutBy the standards of The Incredible Hulk or Wanted—buzzing CG pixel storms in which lives, locations, and bodies exist in perpetual zero gravity—The Exiles may not seem that exciting. An account of 14 dusk-to-dawn hours in a community of scuffling Native Americans—the once-prosperous Bunker Hill—it unfolds without artificial urgency or hyped-up climaxes; it's acted with unpolished conviction by neighborhood residents that the British-born director met in the mid-'50s while researching a documentary. But Mackenzie (who died in 1980 at age 50 after making just one other feature) had an ear for the poetry of ritualized interaction, and an eye for the glint of hard light on city streets. The movie walks a nightworld so crackling with unfocused energy—so alive with threat, promise, and raw honking rock 'n' roll, yet so limited in any sense of a future—that to enter it is to feel your blood surge.

The most immediately striking thing about The Exiles, shot through with humor and nerve and keyed to the throb of Anthony Hilder and the Revels' thrillingly seedy garage rock, is its look. The black-and-white camerawork (by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, and John Morrill) is so starkly high-contrast that the outdoor shots have the muscular definition of a graphic novel. The black has surprising depth, catching hard edges within shadows; the white burns a halo around every liquor-store sign or streetlight.Next, a Minority Report:The film also belongs to an exceptionally creative moment in American independent-film history. Viewed today, The Exiles, despite the anomaly of its refined cinematography, has much in common with independent films made during the period—Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy and John Cassavetes’s Shadows (both 1959) in particular, as well as films by Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, Sidney Meyers, Lionel Rogosin, and Morris Engel. These filmmakers were staking out the terrain of an American neorealism, using nonprofessionals or fledgling actors who played characters very like themselves. The blend of fictional and documentary elements applied to every aspect of production. The shoestring-budget films were often shot documentary-style, with handheld cameras; their scripts were written or improvised in collaboration with the actors.But:I have no doubt that Mackenzie was committed to honestly documenting a ghettoized, desperately impoverished minority that a wealthy city chose to ignore, as well as to finding moments of wild poetry in the experience of people with whom he empathized. Still, I could not help but notice that what was on the screen was in fact a bunch of drunken Indians—not Indians acting drunk and pawing at women but, well, the real thing, aided and abetted by the film’s director. I didn’t need to read in the production notes that “8% of the budget went for alcohol” to understand what I was seeing. At the time of its original release, The Exiles was treated with great respect by critics and cinephiles. (Pauline Kael wrote that 1961 was likely to be remembered in film history as the year of The Exiles.) The veneration of the rerelease has been even more over-the-top. I can only look at the screen and wonder, What’s wrong with this picture?Comment:  Uh, 1961 was the year of Judgment at Nuremberg and West Side Story (not to mention Disney's The Parent Trap). If and when I see The Exiles, I'll let you know if it's better than these movies.

For more on the subject, see Native Documentaries and News.

The Exiles trailer

THE EXILES--Lost Hipster Native film from 1961!A few years ago I began working with Milestone Films to promote my favorite modern Indian film ever made..."THE EXILES." Below is the trailer for the theatrical re-release of this lost film.

Comment:  Based on the trailer, the film certainly looks stylish.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.

1961 film on urban Indians

Portrait of Indian Life in Los Angeles Revived"The Exiles," a film about American Indians living on the edge of central 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.

"The Exiles" was shown at the Venice International Film Festival in 1961 and won plaudits during its brief run on the festival circuit. But it quickly faded from view, as did Mackenzie, who directed only one other feature, "Saturday Morning" (1970), and died, at 50, in 1980.

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, 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.What it's about:"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.

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," 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 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."Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.