ON HENNEPIN ISLAND
In the year, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles was premiered in at the Venice Film Festival, my family moved from New Jersey to Minneapolis. I was six. In those days, gas cost 30 cents a gallon and poor people went for car rides for entertainment. I guess we were poor at that time, although I don’t recall being any different than the other people in our neighborhood.
One Sunday, my father drove from our home in New Brighton over to Columbia Heights and, then, we cruised University Avenue to downtown Minneapolis. In those days, Nicollet Island was covered with old brick tenements four or five stories tall and traffic from University crossed the island to reach Hennepin. Bridges spanned the river leading from slum to slum, a warren of transient hotels, flop houses, tumble-down saloons, and hardscrabble businesses: junk metal shops and plumbing supply houses, second-hand stores and army surplus outlets. On one of the bridges, lying on the sidewalk next to the cast-iron guard rail, a man was on his back, jerking with a seizure. My mother told me not to look at the man sprawled on the sidewalk. Obediently, I closed my eyes.
But I saw alleyways and shabby figures stumbling around between the crumbling buildings. I saw crowds of men standing on street corners as if waiting for something. An old man was vomiting in the gutter while a mangy dog watched. This was skid-row, Minneapolis’ bowery, twenty or so square blocks from the island to the tower of the Milwaukee Road railroad station. "This is why I don’t like cities," my father said to my mother. Both of them were from a very small town in central Nebraska.
The thing that I saw that afternoon are among my earliest memories. Probably, what I best recall is my parents – they would have been 24 or 25 – appalled response to the tenements and bums on the street. On the way home that afternoon, I wondered: Who are these people living in these slums? What are they like? How did they come to be here? Are they human beings like me or something entirely different?
KENT MACKENZIE
Kent MacKenzie, the director The Exiles, was born in London. His mother was English and his father was an American journalist for the Associated Press. Mackenzie moved to the United States when he was 11 and lived in New York City as a child. He made only two feature films, The Exiles and Saturday Morning (1971) When he died in 1980 at the age of 50, Mackenzie was working in Hollywood as an editor of industrial and educational films. Mackenzie sometimes was invited to teach High School classes about documentary films. In LA, some of the High Schools equipped their students with Super 8 cameras and encouraged them to make movies about their families and neighborhoods. When these programs were offered, Mackenzie sometimes participated and, often, would show his own film The Exiles for the kids to give them an example of how such a movie might be made.
Almost no pictures of Mackenzie exist. There is one photograph showing a young and intense-looking young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses gesturing to some Native Americans in a bar. He looks like an "angry young man," the sort of fellow you might meet in 1960 at a Dave Brubeck Concert. This is the only picture that I have seen of the director, although he appears in one of the scenes in The Exiles – he is seated behind Yvonne in the movie theater. (He also briefly leans into the frame in the 49 party scene on Hill X.)
Mackenzie was educated at Dartmouth. Preppie to a fault, Mackenzie was a good tennis player. He spent summers at a camp in upstate New York where he was a tennis instructor. At that camp, he met an Onondaga Indian, Tom Two Arrows, who worked as a craft counselor – this man was a close friend for many years and likely encouraged Mackenzie’s interest in Native American culture. Mackenzie came to southern California in 1956 was he was 26, arriving with his car, some clothes, and forty dollars in his pocket. He enrolled in UCLA and, for a master’s degree project, made a short film about the Bunker Hill neighborhood in Los Angeles. While making this movie, he became friends with the Indians living in the crumbling warren of tenements and bars on Bunker Hill – this is where Frank Gehry’s Disney Theater now stands. Mackenzie spent three years accumulating the footage edited into the 72 minute final cut of The Exiles. The movie was largely shot on "short ends" – that is, unprocessed film left over from 1000 foot rolls, a material that the large studios simply discarded. Mackenzie scavenged "short ends" and produced the film on that stock. The film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1961 and, then, vanished into obscurity. It was not commercially released in the United States until 2008, fifty years after McKenzie began production of the movie. Between 1961 and 2008, the movie existed only in a few 16 millimeter prints and was shown mostly in church basements – the movie was available to education institutions and churches only.
(Mackenzie made one other feature-length picture – this is documentary called Saturday Morning, released in 1971. The film consists of 20 young people between the ages of 15 and 20 discussing their sexual experiences. The movie is ninety minutes long and shot in a picnic-like setting in a wooded glade. Mackenzie had been making sex education films for a few years and, apparently, wanted to use material that he couldn’t work into the pictures produced for high school screening. The movie played for one week in one New York theater. There is a highly condescending and insulting review published in the New York Times – the critic was offended by the "filthy" language used by the kids. (He calls the girls "dolls.") Time magazine praised the movie. No one seems to have seen it during the last 40 years. Rotten Tomatoes shows six viewers: two rated it as superb, two as good, and two as average.)
In 2003, the film maker Thom Anderson released his documentary LA Plays Itself, a three-hour collage film about the history of Los Angeles as portrayed in the movies made in that city. Anderson’s film is a masterpiece in itself, a remarkable survey of hundreds of films, brilliantly curated and presented with a sardonic commentary. In that film, Anderson included several sequences from The Exiles. That movie, Anderson maintained, provided the best account of the vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood around Angel’s Flight and the Grand Street market, places demolished for urban renewal and the construction of the huge Disney theater complex. People who saw the Anderson’s picture were intrigued by the clips from The Exiles and sought out the film. Anderson located Mackenzie’s daughters and secured their rights to use the clips in LA Plays Itself. He encouraged Mackenzie’s two daughters to work with film restoration experts and distributors to engineer a theatrical release of The Exiles. UCLA restored the picture and the movie had a brief commercial release in New York and LA in 2008.
PRODUCTION
Mackenzie was friends with people he portrays in The Exiles, mostly Apache Indians from reservations in Arizona. He encouraged his characters to write out monologues. Some of these monologues appear in the film in voice-overs. Mackenzie used a borrowed camera from a documentary film company to shoot the movie. Since production of the picture occurred only when money was available, The Exiles was shot by six different cameramen at various times. The camera that Mackenzie used was old and noisy. Accordingly, direct sound recording was not possible. All of the dialogue, music, and snippets of TV shows that we hear were post-synchronized. For this reason, we often hear people speaking in the movie but can’t see their lips move on screen.
Although the film looks like a documentary, it is mostly staged, although in real locations. And Mackenzie rehearsed his actors, requiring that they learn their lines. Mackenzie had a shooting script, initially called "The Trail of the Thunderbird" and, then, simply, "Thunderbird" for the fortified wine that some of the characters favor. Mackenzie borrowed money from everyone he knew to make the picture – his barber loaned him some cash and a woman that he knew sold her car and gave him the proceeds. From time to time, Mackenzie had to use his production funds to bail out some of his principal characters who got themselves thrown in jail.
Since Mackenzie couldn’t afford to acquire the rights to any music on the radio or juke-boxes then current, he commissioned a raucous rock and roll score from the Revels, a proto surf-band from San Luis Obispo. (Similarly, the fragments of TV shows that we hear in the film were also invented for the movie). One of the songs, Mackenzie commissioned for the movie, "Comanche," was cut from the film but later became a Top Forty hit. "Comanche" appears in the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
TWO NEIGHBORHOODS
The Exiles provides a glimpse of Los Angeles’ vanished history. The Indians live in Bunker Hill, a neighborhood only several blocks from City Hall and, now, completely gone. Bunker Hill was a poor area, mostly inhabited by elderly pensioners and new immigrants to the city. In the late fifties, the steep slopes of the hill were covered with ramshackle Victorian mansions subdivided into tenements. The people who lived on Bunker Hill shopped at its base in the market on Grand Street. A road ran under the hill through the 3rd Street tunnel shown memorably several times in the film. As previously noted, the structures on the hill were gradually demolished in the name of urban renewal. The footprint of the neighborhood is now occupied by the Disney auditorium, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the antiseptic Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels. (A number of expensive high rise apartments crown the hill, shaved down and flattened from its original bulbous contour.) The Walt Disney Auditorium fronts Grand Street, the location of the market shown in the film. Two tunnels pierce Bunker Hill; the older 3rd Street tunnel featured in the film and the newer 2nd Street tunnel – these tunnels allow surface road access under the hill to west-bound freeways. The center of Bunker Hill was served by the funicular railway Angel’s Flight with its two cars (Sinai and Olivet) ascending a 33% grade – the current location of Angel’s flight is about one-half block from the historic site of the funicular.
The Bunker Hill neighborhood, although architecturally significant for its concentration of late Victorian mansions, came under attack from urban renewal in 1955. (At least four buildings on the hill were thought to be historically and culturally significant – all of them either burned or were de-listed and, then, razed.) At the time of its "renewal", the neighborhood was home to 22,000 people, mostly poor and living on fixed incomes. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion completed in 1962 was one of the first large structures built on the hill. The Walt Disney Concert Hall completed in 2001 (and begun in 1987) replaced the Chandler Pavilion. The eradication of existing substandard housing on Bunker Hill was part of an ambitious plan, scheduled for completion in 2015 – that is, spanning a sixty year period. Other than Angel’s Flight, maintained as a tourist attraction, and the 1200 foot tunnels under the hill nothing remains of the old neighborhood today.
Hill X, the hilltop where the Indians go for their "49" (their post-bar-closing party) is located in a part of Los Angeles that was once called Chavez Ravine. Chavez Ravine was an area of steep terrain, riven with small canyons and the site of five or six Hispanic villages. The people who lived in the Ravine were truck farmers. They lived in shacks and kept livestock in their yards. The neighborhood was said to be very poor, but vibrant. Chavez Ravine was located a quarter of a mile from LA city hall, about a fifteen minute walk from the downtown area. (The Ravine was not developed because its slopes were made of a sticky, slippery clay unique to this part of the L. A. basin and difficult to build on.) Beginning in 1950, plans were developed to relocate the small Mexican villages in the Ravine area to high-rise urban renewal apartments. With the onset of the Red Scare, this plan was criticized by followers of Joe McCarthy as "utopianism" and came under such vigorous attack that the idea was abandoned. Instead, the private property in the area was condemned by exercise of eminent domain and, ultimately, resold to Walter O’Malley. O’Malley built Dodger Stadium on the site of Hill X, also bulldozed into a low mesa to accommodate the sports facility. The Hispanic people living in the Ravine did not give up their homes and small farms without a fight – litigation over their relocation lasted for many years as "the battle of Chavez Ravine" and the last residents of the area were evicted in handcuffs at gunpoint. People who grew up in Chavez Ravine don’t recall the poverty. Instead, they remember a bucolic and peaceful rural area where women tended chickens living in their yards and Basque-speaking shepherds watched over herds of sheep in the hills – all of this within a fifteen minute walk from the Los Angeles City Hall.
49ing
There several meanings to the Indian slang term "49." First, a "49" is a post-pow-wow party, featuring drugs, alcohol, "snagging," and fighting. Most sanctioned pow-wows prohibit alcohol. Accordingly, some pow-wow participants adjourn to a "49" party after the sanctioned event. (The film shows a "49" on Hill X.)
A "49" song is a drum song in which the first verses are sung in a Native language with the final verse performed in English. These kinds of songs are popular at post pow-wow parties.
ON DRINKING
On the commentary track to The Exiles, the well-known American Indian novelist Sherman Alexie comments on Native American alcoholism:
When I used to talk to my old man about his drinking, he would tell me – "I’m drinking because I’m Indian – this is what we do best – this is what we’re good at – drinking is Indian, drinking is indigenous. See, drinking is a political act. Being an alcoholic is declaring independence."
Alexie goes on to say:
Che ran around the mountain shooting people. An Indian gets drunk so he can’t participate in the dominant culture – it’s a revolutionary act.
INDIANS
"Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.
Chief Seattle
"The Holy Land is everywhere."
Nicholas Black Elk
AN APPRECIATION
The popular media have a mania for judgement and explanation. If, for example, a ferry capsizes, someone is responsible and should be held to account. Furthermore, the ferry’s overturning is an event that must be mined for further evidence of significance. People are summoned to testify about the weather, infrastructure, the education system. Proliferating claims are made for the diagnostic significance of this and that related to the calamity under consideration. This model applies to many forms of documentary film – an evil is identified, judged, and, then, explained, significance imputed to the images in ever-widening concentric circles around the event (or people) shown in the film.
At first, Mackenzie’s The Exiles threatens to be such a film. A high and serious tone is imparted to the proceedings by the gravely dignified images of the Native Americans shown in the opening sequence. It seems as if we are going to be hectored, lectured about how Indians displaced from their ancient customs have become a rootless cohort of alcoholic and abusive city dwellers. Surely, there is much blame that can be ascribed all around for this phenomenon.
But, of course, The Exiles doesn’t take this course at all. The people in the movie don’t seem to be suffering much, except for the unfortunate pregnant Yvonne. In fact, the movie is invigorated by the joy of being young, the pleasures of getting drunk with friends, and the fun of non-stop partying. The film isn’t even remotely censorious and judgmental and finds no deeper significance in the events that it shows. In large part, The Exiles is about a group of people recklessly having fun. There is something admirable about the single-minded quest for good times that animates the picture. Mackenzie started off making one kind of film, the sort of picture familiar to all of us, and ended up achieving something completely new and different.
In the early sixties, Susan Sontag published an important essay (later incorporated into a book), "Against Interpretation.’ The gist of Sontag’s argument is that art need not be construed "impiously" – that is, aggressively imposing abstract meanings on an experience that is otherwise primarily sensuous. Rather, we should be capable of experiencing art superficially, that is, without excess of judgment: "we need. not a new hermeneutics, but a new erotics of art," she says concluding her article. The Exiles, I think, is best viewed in terms of its "erotic" elements – the luster of the light against the darkness, the texture of faces, the diffusion of smoke through a bar, sparks from a cigarette caught by the wind and blown away. Some kinds of art affect precisely because the artist witholds judgment. Mackenzie’s strategy in The Exiles is to avoid socio-economic or spiritual or psychological explanations for what we see – instead, his objective seems to be to provide us with vivid images of the life of his protagonists. If we choose to judge them, we can; if we choose to explore the historical or socio-economic implications of what we are shown that path is also available to you. But all explanation is extraneous to the film and apart from what we are shown. Mackenzie doesn’t construe for us what we are shown.
A notable example of Mackenzie’s tact, his willingness to withhold explanation or judgment, is the scene in which Homer imagines life on the reservation. Homer is standing outside a tawdry liquor store, lit in the best garish film noir style. He has received a letter, apparently from his family on the reservation. He peruses the letter while waiting for his friend to come out of the store with booze. Without any intermediary dissolves or fade-outs, the shot switches to an older man sitting under a tree and shaking a rattle as he sings to himself. Some women, presumably Homer’s mother and sister, are sprawled on the ground playing with puppies. A man rides up to the shack where the man is singing under the tree. The man says something in an Indian language that we can’t understand, there is a brief conversation, and, then, he rides away on his horse. We see a collapsed building and the horse and rider slowly moving through a nondescript desert landscape. Then, the film cuts back to Homer waiting for his booze. Mackenzie scrupulously refuses to explicate what we have seen; the film doesn’t impute any particular meaning or significance to the shots showing the singing man, the women and the puppies, and their visitor on horseback. We don’t know if these images are a flashback or shots of something actually happening more or less simultaneous to the events shown in the film. Further, we don’t know if these images are in Homer’s memory or imagination or represent events parallel to the film’s action in the city. We don’t know what the man is singing nor do we know the significance of his song or what the man on horseback says. We don’t know where the man on horseback is going. Mackenzie shows reservation life as different from what his Indian protagonists experience in the city – but it is not necessarily better or worse: the Indians in the city seem bored, repeating the same round of drinking, flirting, and fighting night after night. But not much seems to be happening on the reservation either. The one environment is not posited as more natural or better than the other – a conspicuous withholding of interpretation since the obvious inclination would be to show that life of the reservation is more pure, more authentic, if also more impoverished than life in the city. But Mackenzie doesn’t make this kind of argument – two forms of life are shown and neither is proclaimed to be superior to the other. The fact is that the reservation and traditional life in that place is boring. And, Mackenzie’s hellraising young men, and their girlfriends, at least seem to be having fun in the big city.
In his poem, "Break of Day," John Donne says:
Light hath no tongue, but is all eye...
Movie-making is painting with light. Light doesn’t have to explain itself. It is all eye.
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