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Distribute This! Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961) "Distribute This!" is a space intended to showcase works that have not yet had the opportunity to find their audience. Not generally distributed at the time of writing, these are films that deserve to be seen, and theaters full of viewers are waiting for them. In case you're ever wondering if you're wasting your life watching way too many movies, I would like to remind you that film buffs may have done more for our cultural heritage and history in general — not just film history — through our enthusiasm than most people ever attempt. Henri Langlois, the ultimate film buff, literally saved thousands of films from destruction just by becoming a collector. Similarly, a sometime documentary film maker named Thom Andersen, who made a film in 1974 about Eadweard Muybridge, the Father of Motion Pictures, and made only two more since then, has managed to resurrect a film destined to be forgotten and possibly lost. In his tribute to Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), this lover of film found a 1961 film called The Exiles and excerpted from it liberally to show Bunker Hill, one of the city's vibrant working/lower-class neighborhoods just before it was urban-renewed out of existence. Of the many films he sampled, The Exiles was the one I most wanted to see. Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center dug up a pristine copy of this classic film and scheduled two showings; I was one of the lucky few who got a chance to see it.
The Exiles starts by showing archival stills of Indians both famous and forgotten and their way of life before their complete domination by the White Man took place. The film mentions the Native Americans' fate and how a new generation of Native Americans was leaving the reservations to find a new way of life in the cities of the United States. The scene switches to Los Angeles and a particular group of Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill neighborhood. A collage of buildings sets the scene of this now-razed area of Los Angeles, ending at the Angels Flight funicular, which was used for transportation before it was resurrected a few years ago as a sort of Disneyland ride for Angelenos and tourists alike. We see a female Native American climbing halfway up the hill that the funicular scales and stepping into a hillside maze of buildings where her apartment lies. What follows is a combination of interior monologues by this woman, her husband, and a bon vivant friend of theirs, and scenes of life in the neighborhood as they and their friends wander through it, carousing, card playing, drinking, fighting, and in quiet camaraderie before more of the same begins again the following day.
Why has this film gone into eclipse? The reasons range from the small creative output of the man who crafted it to difficulty categorizing it to the lack of plot. America's embarrassment over the treatment of its native population probably also has helped ensure its obscurity (as it has a classic from the silent era, The Vanishing American), an obscurity that only grows with the passage of time. However, this film deserves the embrace of a film public hungering for original, homegrown independent films that tell us who we are. "Distribute This!" proudly supports The Exiles. February 2005 | Issue 47 Marilyn Ferdinand is a Chicago-based freelance writer and a founding member of the Third Eye Film Society, a comprehensive message board for film and arts enthusiasts. ACCESS: None ... yet. Hence the title plea "Distribute This!" We've been patient since 1961, and we're starting to seriously fidget. ALSO: Click here for more reviews. |
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New book from the
editor and writers of
Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors
from Classical Hollywood to
Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture),
by Gary Morris (Editor),
Bert Cardullo (Introduction),
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword).
London and New York:
Anthem Press, 2009.
"I dare anyone to squeeze between
two covers a more varied, useful and
flat out entertaining sampling of
the personalities that make the
seventh art the liveliest."
David Hudson, IFC.com
Interviews
Robert Bresson
Roger Corman (with Bruce Dern
and David Carradine)
Allan Dwan
Clint Eastwood
Douglas Sirk
Robert Wise
Mania Akbari
Lars von Trier
Michael Haneke
Allie Light
Melvin and Mario van Peebles
Otto Muehl
The Brothers Quay
Barbara Kopple
Federico Fellini
Abbas Kiarostami
François Truffaut
Caveh Zahedi
Peter Bogdanovich and
Joseph McBride
on Orson Welles