The Exiles (MacKenzie, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm
This 35mm presentation (also screening on October 19th) is part of the Joanna Hogg: Influences season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Written,
produced, and directed by Kent Mackenzie, this low-budget independent
feature (1961) deserves to be ranked with John Cassavetes's Shadows, but
it languished unseen for nearly four decades until Thom Andersen
celebrated it in his 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. Pitched
somewhere between fiction and documentary, with non-professional actors
improvising postsynced dialogue and internal monologues, it follows a
few uprooted Native Americans from Friday night to Saturday morning in
the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Its moving portraiture is
refreshingly free of cliches and moralizing platitudes, and the
high-contrast black-and-white photography and dense, highly creative
sound track are equally impressive (even the occasional imprecise lip
sync seems justified). Mackenzie lived only long enough to make one
other feature—Saturday Morning (1971), which I haven't seen—but this
film's lowercase urban poetry suggests a major talent.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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