The Exile Film by Kent MacKenzie - Essay Example

The Exile is a 1961 film directed by Kent MacKenzie. The film recounts the journey of a group of Native Americans from a reservation in 1950s to live in Bunker, Los Angeles. The film is a narrative feature that combines a script of interviews and documentary subjects. The main actors are Homer Nish, Yvonne Williams, and Tommy Reynolds. The film events are wrapped in rock and roll music composed and performed by The Revels. In this essay, the events and presentation of the American Indians in the movie are revisited with a perspective of Pratt’s contact zone concept. Pratt (1) analyses that contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple” against each other and it takes the form of power relations like slavery, impoverishment and exile as in the film The Exiles. In this film, MacKenzie chooses to present the characters against the conventions and true to the reality and expectations. There are contexts of unresolved tensions as the cast of American Indian actors are depicted as lacking self-consciousness, but the fault is not theirs. For example, the characters drink and socialize during a night out in the town and end up in a bash of drumming and dancing on Hill X (Fleischer 2). The characters are wrapped up in a desire to assimilate into the mainstream urban culture and values that are tenets of the American dream. Moreover, the American Indian characters gave the film a narrative that spans around the clock; from day to night infinitum. The film is many things packed in one narrative that narrowly borders between fiction and nonfiction. For example, the film captures the rotten building walls, the neon signs and despairing faces of Los Angeles exiled residents (Manohla 1). These blink images represent the future and hope of the exiles or residents of the place. The mansions were once habitable and had honor just like the American Indians had a stable culture that enabled them to live in harmony with nature and themselves before they were confined in reserves and later evicted to Los Angeles. However, time and fate has caught up with them and their future is pessimistic and holds very little for them. This way, MacKenzie gave the viewers a fresh ground of observing and identifying with a desperate world, and thus establishing what Pratt would call contact zone (p.1) in terms of power. The opening of the film is graced by a pompous series of pictures of indigenous people in the wake of 20th century shot by Edward S. Curtis. These pictures are a first impression of nostalgia and revelation of the stark truth about the time in a fanciful manner. The photos are so powerful that they set a sober mood of the film. The male voice-over deepens the funereal tone as it breaks softly but authoritatively the incumbent mood. The voice-over analyzes that there was at one time a freedom of these people’s culture, the culture set them free and were pure in the sense that their cultural values were not adulterated. The voice breaks the silence thus “Once the American Indian lived in the ordered freedom of his own culture” (The Exiles. Dir. Kent MacKenzie). The message that is captured in this statement is a historic and explorative in the fact that there was ones freedom for American Indians. The voice-over goes on to state the second statement avers that the white man came with confinement and strewn the American Indian from their cultural freedom thus: “Then, in the 19th century, the white man confined him within the boundaries of the tribal reservation” (The Exiles. Dir. Kent MacKenzie). However, the events that follow and build the movie to the end do not follow this foundation; the viewer is taken to the busy downtown where we meet an Indian woman Yvonne as she weaves through an open air market. She then goes to an overcrowded apartment where there are many men; including her husband Homer, who seem not to notice her even as she prepares some fries for them. The viewer is shifted to Homer and his friends as they engage in some drinking and generic mischief, and they then left to another legendary Los Angeles neighborhood dominated by Latino families; other evictees of the late 1950s. Although their history is different, their contact zone is established in the “exhilarating moments” they share in drinking sprees, dominated by fights and indulgence (Pratt 6). Yvonne alongside her husband and Tommy their family friend are featured as dilapidated, unloved, and lonely. Yvonne at one time is seen sandwiched in a multitude of people, and she is complaining of the child in her belly and her husband at home. She says that she used to go to church and asked God whatever she wanted. She complains that since the prayers did not come true she has stopped going to church and she no longer says her prayers. She wished her unborn child to go to school and college, but this might not come true again because of her husband’s state (Fleischer 4). The characters are desperate as Homer and Tommy hopelessly indulge in alcohol, homer is desperate and at one time he says that all he needed was “a little action…you know, a score, a fight, and some action” (The Exiles. Dir. Kent MacKenzie). Yvonne has no sense of hope and she is a despaired woman. The film depicts these American Indians as leaving in blink and despair; a picture that America would like to forget but the presentation has immortalized these provocative thoughts. The film depicts Homer as a person who has lost much hope, he has resorted to alcohol and through his eyes the viewer is shown many other desperadoes indulging in drugs. One old man is seen tilting himself sideways while drinking alcohol as other desperate men watch. Young men are shown rocking and rolling with Chinese counterparts in radical dance as Homer hopelessly smashes his bottle off the table. The exiles in this film are American Indians and we meet them while they are alcoholics, unemployed and locked in a cycle of in fighting and partying all time round the clock without hope for better future. The director used his cast to create and present a typical day situation. The combination of the rock and roll, the all drinking, fighting all night and smocking among the American Indian desperadoes is a more vivid representation of a rotting society; the dregs of the society at the time. It is highly unforgiving if a society can be so cruel to abandon its members to sink in despair to these levels (Manohla 1). At this point, the events presented are not merely physical but rooted deep into the rot in the society. The society may ignore these depictions but they are realities, sharp realities. Seeing the way the crowd on a hilltop with beating drums welcome the dawn drinking, fighting and smoking is more of a presentation of this reality. In conclusion, The Exile film is a critical documentary of the relationship that existed among society members. It recounts the long path to capture with a universal culture and the wounds that the struggle to equalize and assimilate into wide American culture is; something that everyone would wish not to remember in the 20th century. The film establishes the power relation that Pratt calls contact zone in which the exiles find their social space in a conflicting culture that clash with each other as symbolized by the individual “friendly” clashes as the characters indulge in drinking (p.1). This is so painful, especially considering the way cultures have found value in integration, coexistence and symbiotic mingling regardless of class, and relative values. Works Cited Fleischer, Matthew. “Exiles on Main Street: Searching for the Ghosts of Bunker Hill's Native American Past.” LA Weekly (pp. 1-4). 13 Aug. 2008. 5 Dec. 2013 http://www.laweekly.com/2008-08-14/film-tv/exiles-on-main-street/ Manohla, Dargis. “Despair and Poetry at Margins of society.” The New York Times. 11 Jul. 2008. 5 Dec. 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/movies/11exil.html?_r=0 Pratt, Louise M. Arts of the Contact Zone. New York: MLA, 1991. pp. 1-6. The Exiles. Dir. Kent MacKenzie. Prod. Kent MacKenzie. Internet Movie Database, 2013. Read More