THE EXILES

I want to write about THE EXILES, but I'm not sure I'm worthy. Other Cinema screened this until-recently-lost classic of independent film last night here in San Francisco, while The Mission district was still just thinking about swallowing more than it could handle in a massive rainstorm. (As for moi, I'm starting to get the picture: it doesn't matter where I live, lovely, brilliant film nuts will wind up handing me paper cups full of anonymous hooch and calling me family, sooner or later...)

So THE EXILES gives us a gorgeous, dense tour-- through incredibly subtle camera work and sparkling nighttime photography-- of one night in the late-1950s Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the lives of the Native Americans who lived in its bona fide Decayed Hollywood Mansions. The neighborhood is now gone, but at the time, former mansions of the fallen rich and famous were turned into tenement houses for Native Americans lured (sometimes with cash) from Southwest reservations to live "a better life" in the city. Although THE EXILES is scripted, Director Kent MacKenzie threads dialogue from recorded interviews with several young Indians through re-enactments of an average day/night in their pretty much skid row lives. As a picture of gentrification-in-progress (Bunker Hill was razed and developed not long after the film was shot), aspects of THE EXILES brought a fine polish to the truly bizarre, present-day opulence of my own city just outside the theatre. And I had to wonder whether this relocation project was a grim effort to simultaneously continue the Southwestern landgrab from reservations by reducing their younger generations, while ensuring that those young people basically self-destructed. It sure looked that way.

Sherman Alexie called the film, "Gritty, realistic and far ahead of its time (in a period when Hollywood films featured noble savages), the script for THE EXILES was created exclusively from recorded interviews with the participants and with their ongoing input during the shooting of the film. Native American writers and activists have long considered the film as one of first works of art to portray modern life honestly and as an important forerunner for the cultural renaissance of American Indian fiction, poetry, filmmaking and theater starting in the 1970s." Was THE WIRE an actual documentary, it might look something like this.