The Exiles

Director: Kent Mackenzie

1961 / 72min / 35mm

Something like the Los Angelino equivalent to Lionel Rogosin’s portrait of down-and-out New York in On the Bowery, The Exiles is the result of an extended collaboration between Scottish-born independent filmmaker MacKenzie and his subjects, young Native Americans living in the crumbling Victorian slums of Bunker Hill, working with them to craft a narrative they believed representative of their lives, with their inner musings represented in confessional voiceover. Shot with its three principles—Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds—between 1958 and 1961, The Exiles seems to unfold over the course of one bibulous night, by turns melancholy, angry, and ecstatic. Shooting the nocturnal city in high-contrast black and white, MacKenzie shows us LA at its most beautiful, and its most cold.