The polymath Scott Young – co-founder of the City of Angles Film Festival, minister, film historian, and cinéaste – presented The Exiles on Friday at the opening night of this year’s program at the Directors Guild.
The City of Angles Film Festival creates an informed audience for movies that reflect on themes of moral conflict, redemption, and the making of communities of faith. Scott’s special contribution is to focus on movies that pick up these themes and add the dimension of Los Angeles as subject.
I came along to offer some comments to filmmakers and film students about the erased city that The Exiles recalls with such terrible beauty. The panel discussion justly focused, however, on the comments of Erik Daarstad and John Morrill, two of the film’s three cinematographers. Their extraordinary camera work made the streets around now vanished Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine into a voluptuous city of the night.
Kent Mackenzie made The Exiles over a span of more than three years, beginning in 1957 with a year-long long prelude while he moved among the members of the city’s Native American community, gathering actors and collaborating with them on his project. Eventually, Mackenzie included other “exiles” of the city – Latino and mestizo actors, as well as gays and blacks. The film was completed by 1961, won prizes, and disappeared except as an ethnographic study shown to college students in grainy 16mm prints. Mackenzie had a brief Hollywood career and died in 1980.
Thom Anderson’s monumental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself renewed interest in Mackenzie’s film in 2003. That led to its restoration by the UCLA and USC film preservation programs and its re-release by Milestone Films in 2008. After nearly 50 years of obscurity, The Exiles returned to reveal the genius of Kent Mackenzie. And to reveal something about how to live in this city of displaced persons.
Mackenzie’s internalization of film noir, French cinéma vérité, and Italian neo-realism gives the film its blazing style, but his immersion in the community he documents gives the film its toughness and power. Mackenzie’s genius was to seamlessly blend enormous filmmaking skill with his human sympathy.
Mackenzie shows a slice of life in mid-century Los Angeles, and it is a life that bitter and melancholy, full of dislocations and dead ends, a pitiable slice perhaps. But Mackenzie’s purpose, it seems to me, was not to measure the social distance between middle-class audiences and the working poor of downtown. He does something entirely more significant than reminding us of what we ought to know and feel already.
The Exiles is neither documentary nor fiction (although it uses elements of both). It is a work of near perfect equilibrium about its difficult subjects, touched intermittently with a fierce joy.
Above all, it is a work of moral imagination. (John Cheever wrote of something he called "moral beauty," which seems to get partly at what is underway in The Exiles. Cheever said of moral beauty "that it corrects the measure and nature of my thinking.")
The formation of a moral imagination is a means by which we write ourselves into the story of this place and its redemptive mix of tragedies and ordinariness; a way to negotiate the hard transition from the personal to the public, from a flawed private life to the flawed – but sacred, human and humanizing – body of the place which is our home.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Kevitivity. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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