The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie discovered Bunker Hill, the low-rent residential neighbourhood on the west edge of downtown Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s when it was first threatened with demolition. As he was making the short documentary Bunker Hill about it, he also became fascinated with a subculture of Arizona Indians living on Bunker Hill. A few years later, he made them the subject of the semi-documentary The Exiles. Mackenzie’s decision to film The Exiles in 1958 on 35 mm was a conscious aesthetic decision. He wasn’t able to record dialogue on location, so he relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voice-overs to tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn. It is a night full of loneliness and yearning, petty betrayals and disappointments and little flashes of happiness. It ends with an attempt to revive old bonds and ceremonies on a hilltop above the city, but this eventually degenerates into fist fights. The Exiles is a wrenching document of cultural dislocation and a remarkable record of a city that has vanished. In the late 1950s, it was still possible to think that all elements of society could share downtown Los Angeles. Since then, Los Angeles has become more segregated, and its downtown has been remolded over and over in efforts at gentrification that have never quite taken hold. Thom Andersen (the maker of Los Angeles Plays Itself, see further on, which includes many fragments from The Exiles)