The Exiles (1961)

These program notes were written for the Rochester premiere of The Exiles on 21 and 22 November 2008 at the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House. The always intrepid Milestone will be releasing a DVD of The Exiles, which will include four (!) Mackenzie short films and too many other supplements to list here, on 17 November 2009.

The Exiles
Production Credits
Director/Writer/Producer: Kent Mackenzie ● Photography: Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, John Morrill ● Music: The Revels

Principal Cast
Yvonne William, Homer Nish, Tommy Reynolds

Country of Origin: USA ● Year: 1961 ● Running Time: 72 minutes

Because The Exiles has finally received its first theatrical release some forty-seven years after its completion, it is tempting to regard it as a film understood better now than then, a recovered masterpiece. Yet as an independent production from the early 1960s The Exiles is hardly an aberration. The erosion of the studio system during the 1950s had allowed talented upstarts like Stanley Kubrick and Samuel Fuller to land studio contracts after attention-grabbing low-budget successes. This was the period that saw resolutely challenging films from the likes of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie and relatively more commercial incursions from John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, and Lionel Rogosin. The film festival circuit was growing each year and every film school student had a shot at the big time.

In this respect The Exiles achieved almost blessed success. How many student films receive a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, go on to festival engagements in Mannheim, San Francisco, London, Chicago, and Edinburgh, and land on the cover of Film Quarterly? This for a film begun by a group of friends from the USC Cinema Program holding down workaday jobs on the margins of the industry and shot piecemeal over the course of almost three and a half years. If anything, The Exiles would serve as an inspiration to film students everywhere—indeed, the Screen Director’s Guild gave Mackenzie a $1,200 scholarship to write a master’s thesis on his theory and practice. By that time Mackenzie had already liquidated his savings to finance the film and secured donations from his brother-in-law, his barber, and countless others.

Although The Exiles is in many ways a prime exemplar of its vibrant moment it is also quite an exceptional piece. Many independent landmarks of the period were shot with lightweight, flexible 16mm cameras but Mackenzie and his cinematographers made The Exiles in 35mm with a borrowed camera. They shot some 50,000 feet of negative from unused 300-foot scraps purportedly salvaged from Desilu Studios and, on another occasion, a plane crash.

How Mackenzie and his crew procured the means of production makes a curious anecdote; what they did with it proved more interesting. The Exiles has been described as a piece of documentary fiction—and indeed Mackenzie’s free-form compositions and his unorthodox way of letting them flow together is quite unlike anything seen in Hollywood narrative films in 1961. It is not wrong to compare Mackenzie to Jean Rouch or Jean Vigo or any number of other then-influential French filmmakers whose films danced on the line separating documentary from fiction. It is not wrong but not right either. At first glance many shots in The Exiles seem like marvelous feats of guerrilla filmmaking—scenes coaxed out of any available light in a dank bar or an alley. In fact these scenes were highly choreographed and their lighting meticulously planned to give the impression of documentary naturalism. There is also the matter of the rather dense soundtrack: all the dialogue was dubbed in a studio, months or years after the scenes had been photographed. The music, seemingly all tunes overheard from the radio, is all the work of one high school band, The Revels, here accorded the illusion of zeitgeist cachet.

Mackenzie’s account of his method confounds as much as it clarifies: “No theatrical or documentary approach—in which a problem is stated and the decisions and actions of the characters proceed either to achieve or suggest a pat solution—seemed suitable for the film. The situation in which these people are involved could not be brought to a stage and reenacted. The thousands of details involved in their environment could never be duplicated …. We sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up. Then, instead of supplying a resolution, we hoped that somewhere in the showing, the picture would become, to the viewer, a revelation of a condition about which he will either do something, or not — whichever his own reaction dictates.”

The Exiles oscillates between social inquiry and professional calling card: it’s a film that critiques the inadequacies of the documentary idiom while striving to emulate it. The film is not unlike a master’s thesis: it demonstrates the depth of the candidate’s research (Mackenzie boasted of his anthropological surveys and his data from civic groups, government agencies, and interested observers) and his formal sensitivity.

How much The Exiles can actually teach us about its ostensible subjects—American Indians, life off the reservation, working class struggles at midcentury, or a Bunker Hill soon made unrecognizable by urban renewal—is up for debate. (For his part, Mackenzie maintained the Indians did not regard him as an outsider or an opportunist. “It was more important that we’d promised them a party,” he said.) The political reaction on the festival circuit was mixed: an award in Venice and skepticism elsewhere, with reports that audiences found the Indians “unpleasant” and “distasteful,” the portrayal of their plight “unsympathetic.” The U. S. State Department was no fan either.

Mackenzie continued to work on The Exiles for some years; in a bid for distribution he chopped the film from 77 to 72 minutes and added a (heavy-handed) prologue about the Indian in America illustrated with some Edward S. Curtis photographs. In 1964 The Exiles received a slot in the inaugural New York Film Festival line-up, but the distributors remained largely indifferent; Pathe Contemporary made 16mm prints available to the classroom market but did not entertain a theatrical run.

Thus while The Exiles has always been with us in a subterranean way (similar, in fact, to the fate of Killer of Sheep) it was not widely seen or remarked upon. Thom Andersen’s approving citation of the film in his 2003 video essay Los Angeles Play Itself sparked renewed interest in Mackenzie’s work. The original 35mm elements were found in a USC archive and brought to UCLA Film & Television Archive, whom we have to thank for the present sparkling restoration. Today, ironically, The Exiles’ value as a not-quite-documentary record of a vanished lifestyle substantially outweighs the limitations of its affectations.


For Further Reading
Hunter, Benjamin, “Film Review” [The Exiles]. Film Quarterly, Spring 1962, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 59-62

Aboveground: Killer of Sheep (1977)

For many years Killer of Sheep persisted more as a legend than as a movie. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis film, shot in the alleys and bungalows of Watts over a year’s worth of weekends with a cast and crew of friends, never entered the commercial distribution channels but nevertheless built a substantial reputation. It was the kind of independent production that the specialists had deemed essential—an early entry on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry even though Burnett’s film never had the chance to reverberate through the national consciousness. It was a piece of American heritage even if most Americans ignored it and the few who sought it out had hard luck finding it. Killer of Sheep became a staple of most discussions of black independent filmmaking, even if it was only a title that triggered nods and genuflection. People who’d never seen a Burnett film nevertheless cited his largely unknown body of work as a rejoinder to media hype and adulation over Spike Lee. There was this film called Killer of Sheep out there somewhere and it sounded like a honey of a cudgel if one was out to dismiss the latest independent up-and-comer, black or white.

I’d noticed references to Killer of Sheep for a few years before I got a chance to see the film. Like Chimes of Midnight, it was a legendary but unavailable film that belied the all-too-frequent conventional wisdom that DVDs and Netflix had made cinematic connoisseurship available to everyone regardless of geography. The only way one could see Killer of Sheep was by seeking out dens of taste and programming savvy in a local context. I heard that an Introduction to Film section at the University of Chicago would be screening the film one Sunday afternoon. I knew the instructor, so I slipped into the screening along with a few friends I invited who’d also run across arcane allusions to Killer of Sheep on occasion. The style was quite a bit different from the three Burnett shorts and one feature I’d seen already. It was an unassuming picture, the kind that one often struggles to get one’s head around. Purportedly an American take on the neorealist movies of DeSica, Burnett’s film constantly undercut all the expectations that came with that Italian baggage: the film’s incidents of degradation and listlessness never congealed into a protest or a statement, per se—just an unpredictable set of scenes that seemed to say everything and nothing about being black in America. Killer of Sheep was such a confounding experience that I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was disappointed upon finally seeing it.

When I spoke afterwards with the instructor who’d put Killer of Sheep on his syllabus he expressed surprise that Burnett had ever made another movie. It was easier—and, in some ways, keeping with the myth—to believe that Killer of Sheep was totally sui generis. Later, with indistinct memories of Killer of Sheep on my mind, I hastily composed this bit of prose to accompany a Burnett Q&A session: “Burnett’s does something more…: it lingers on a scene until its documentary value has been exhausted and its unanticipated poetry has been revealed.” That’s not entirely wrong but it’s not very insightful either.

I had the chance to see Killer of Sheep again last week at the Crest, the Sacramento art house that I patronized with some regularity during high school. In those years I’d see whatever had attracted a moderate amount of critical controversy, though I always secretly wished that the Crest would jazz things up a bit and dig up something like Killer of Sheep instead. Now, thanks to the indefatigable tenacity of Milestone’s Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, that flippant, adolescent desire has been realized. Milestone spent six years clearing the music rights to Killer of Sheep—the official reason the film never saw a commercial release over the past thirty years. After breaking house records in New York and winding through the country, Killer of Sheep finally reaches the smaller markets and draws a sparse crowd. Alas, white boy cinephiles must find a new rite of passage now that Killer of Sheep no longer needs tracking down.

Seeing Killer of Sheep with an audience in a commercial movie theater (even an art house) is quite different from seeing it with a dozen college freshmen who stared at this holy grail with indifferent, weary eyes. One lesson: Killer of Sheep is a crowd-pleaser, at least if I measure that from the hearty cackles and cries of ‘Oh shit!’ that met the protagonist Stan’s misadventures throughout the film. Audiences are getting Killer of Sheep, even though this 35mm version is shorn of ‘Unforgettable’ in the final sequence and often projected in the wrong aspect ratio. (Most modern commercial theaters do not have the proper 1.37:1 lenses that would allow them to screen the film without occasionally chopping off a head from the top of the frame. Burnett shot the film on 16mm, a format that’s never subjected to the 1.85:1 masking that constitutes the industry standard for 35mm. And, while UCLA’s restoration efforts and Milestone’s publicity campaign are clearly positive developments, the thirty-years-coming popularity of Killer of Sheep has its drawbacks: the film has been criss-crossing commercial art houses so much this summer that the print screened last night was much more heavily scratched than the 16mm print that used to circulate through a certain underground outfit.)

The film isn’t necessarily any easier to grasp today than it was upon first viewing. Most literature on the film defines Killer of Sheep by what it’s not: a conventional narrative film or a blaxploitation effort. (Providing an alternative to the images of the latter was one of Burnett’s aims in making Killer of Sheep in the first place.) Still, it is not entirely without precedent. Burnett’s efforts to craft a ghetto-as-slaughterhouse analogy remind this viewer of the heavy-handed juxtapositions in Eisenstein’s Strike and Chaplin’s Modern Times: all three films present the slaughter of livestock as a metaphor for the plight of the proletariat. The closest antecedent as narrative structure goes looks to be Boris Barnett’s Okraina, that vision of the Eastern front from 1933 that moves from one register to another with ease and unpredictability. Both Burnett and Barnett’s films are effectively a string of vignettes and it takes a few moments wading into each before we can determine whether this episode picks up a previous narrative thread or spins something entirely new. We know characters by gestures and tics before we know them by their professions or by their relationships to each other.

Killer of Sheep lacks the classical craftsmanship of Burnett’s masterpiece, To Sleep with Anger, but its own style is a rich and provocative one. Burnett alternates without any discernible pattern between heavy, pore-exposing close-ups and elaborate master shots wherein characters wander and cavort and play tricks on each other. These shots are somewhat akin to the better moments in James Benning’s contemporaneous One Way Boogie Woogie: each shot is like a closed system with each element in the frame appearing to be but one part in a raucous assembly line. The suspense and the poetry of each shot derives from the foreordained knowledge that the whole thing will fall out of balance at any moment when a single part deviates from the design. Killer of Sheep is a film about waiting: waiting for one kid to wallop the other or waiting for a poorly secured motor to fall out of a pick-up cab. Yet even when Burnett keeps these minor promises the shape of the whole remains stubbornly fixed. The kids don’t grow up and the adults don’t move up the social ladder. Burnett avoids imposing a dramatic arc on the material by leaving it incomplete, almost retarded in its natural progression. It takes some time to realize that Burnett isn’t so much prematurely abandoning the material before the big climax as he is sailing past that moment and following his characters through a state of perpetual denouement. They continue quietly unsatisfied but well past the point where they might change anything.