THE EXILES is screening as part of continuing Milestone celebration at the IFC Center
THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
January 7-9
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.coms
www.exilesfilm.com
Founded in 1990 by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller as a way to preserve great orphaned works, Milestone Films is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a series of Weekend Classics screenings at the IFC Center. The festival began in November with Luchino Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS and Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and continues this weekend with Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film THE EXILES. Having restored Charles Burnett’s wonderful KILLER OF SHEEP and MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. THE EXILES follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment. As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving THE EXILES a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up THE EXILES with the documentaries THE TEENAGE REVOLUTION (1965) and SATURDAY MORNING (1971) before his death in 1980 at the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society. THE EXILES is being screened at IFC with Mackenzie’s rarely seen 1956 short, BUNKER HILL.