DVD of the Week: The Exiles

By coincidence, I’m posting this clip, in which I discuss Kent Mackenzie’s film “The Exiles,” from Los Angeles, where it was made. I have the privilege and the pleasure of spending a few days talking with students here at Claremont; if I had the time (which, unfortunately, I don’t), I’d take a little side trip to visit Bunker Hill, the neighborhood where the movie was shot and which the movie is about. When “The Exiles” was made (between 1958 and 1961), that neighborhood had many Native American residents who had come from reservations; Mackenzie got to know people there and persuaded them to re-enact particular aspects of their lives for him on-camera.

Today, a student asked about the recent film “The American”; I explained why I didn’t think too much of it, and referred to “The Exiles” as a contrasting—and related—and better—way of making a film. In particular, I described the first dramatic scene, in which a young woman, Yvonne, is wandering through an open-air market, shopping for food or perhaps just killing time—and her voice-over is heard, in which she speaks of her hopes, fears, and aspirations. I told the student that this is what’s missing from “The American”: the introduction of elements that would make us aware of the hit man’s mental life.

I love the heterogenous in cinema; it’s a mark of directorial artistry to bring disparate and surprising elements together in a film and to harmonize them. I told the student that Corbijn was just enough of a filmmaker to maintain a unified tone with a single (and pretty dull, and dully pretty) type of parts, whereas Mackenzie keeps inner and outer life in balance; he plausibly conveys the impression (a remarkable one) of the viewer’s intimacy with the characters’ thoughts without letting their perspective override their tangible action. The two films have little in common, but Mackenzie is an artist whose style conveys substance; Corbijn’s style depends on the suppression of substance and takes the place of it.

Shocking it is to note that Mackenzie’s career did not take off. On IMDb, he’s credited with the direction of two more films: “The Teenage Revolution,” a documentary for TV, from 1965, and “Saturday Morning,” a documentary, from 1971. He died, at the age of fifty, in 1980. It’s inconceivable to me that a wise producer, after seeing “The Exiles,” wouldn’t have done anything necessary to keep Mackenzie working. I don’t know the story of Mackenzie’s life and work, but the bare bones of an outline suggest a terrible frustration.

P.S. I reviewed the remarkable two-disk set of “The Exiles” when it came out last year. It’s worth repeating that the second disk features (in addition to several short films by Mackenzie) his master’s thesis, in which he describes and analyzes the making of the film; I wrote then that “it’s one of the greatest works ever written on the subject of filmmaking, and deserves to be released on its own as a book.”