[nativestudies-l] The Exiles at the MFA Sept 26

[Stefanie Lubkowski]

The MFA Film Program is proud to to present a 6 show engagement of a
restored 35 mm print of Kent MacKenzie's 1961 film The Exiles, September
26-October 3.  This is the first time that The Exiles has been widely
available for theatrical engagements.  The Exiles, was possibly inspired
by Kent MacKenzie's friendship with Native American artist and dancer
Tom Two Arrows, whom he met when they were both summer camp counselors
in Maine during Kent's years at Dartmouth.   Gritty, realistic and far
ahead of its time (in a period when Hollywood films featured noble
savages), the script for The Exiles was created exclusively from
recorded interviews with the participants and with their ongoing input
during the shooting of the film. Native American writers and activists
have long considered the film as one of first works of art to portray
modern life honestly and as an important forerunner for the cultural
renaissance of American Indian fiction, poetry, filmmaking and theater
starting in the 1970s.  The Exiles is also an artifact of a lost time
and place. In the early 1960s, developers and city planners not only
razed the existing homes and tenements of Bunker Hill, which Kent
documents in both his first film, Bunker Hill-1956, and in The Exiles,
they leveled much of the hill itself - replacing a residential
neighborhood with high-rises, office buildings and more recently, the
Walt Disney Concert Hall.  

 

"The Exiles is almost unbearably intimate, allowing us to ride along for
a raucous night on the town while simultaneously peering into its deeply
conflicted characters' souls."  - LA Times

Kent MacKenzie was born in England in 1930.  He spent much of his
childhood shuttling back and forth between England and New York.  Kent
attended Dartmouth College ,where he studied English literature and film
writing.  After several years in the army, Kent moved to California and
enrolled in University of Southern California Cinema Department.  His
student film, the documentary Bunker Hill-1956 was screened at the
Edinburgh Film Festival where it won a Silver Award.  The Exiles was his
second feature film.  Kent edited, produced and directed one other
feature film, Saturday Morning, in 1971 before he passed away in Marin
County, California in May 1980.

Tickets: Members, seniors and students $8; general admission $10.
Discount matinee prices (weekday until 5 pm; weekends until 12:30 pm)
are $6, $7.  To purchase please call the box office at 617-369-3306 or
online at www.mfa.org/film <http://www.mfa.org/film> .  

 

The Exiles

Fri. Sept. 26 6:45 pm

Sat. Sept 27 7:30 pm

Wed. Oct. 1 6:45 pm

Fri. Oct. 3 4:30 pm

Sat. Oct. 4 12:00 pm

Wed. Oct. 8 5:00 pm

The Exiles by Kent MacKenzie (1961, 72 min.). Three years in the making,
The Exiles  chronicles a day in the life of a group of twenty-something
Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the
district of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. Bunker Hill was then a blighted
residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured
in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski.
The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script
pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects. The New
Yorker critic Richard Brody says, "Miraculous...few directors in the
history of cinema have so skillfully and deeply joined a sense of place
with the subtle flux of inner life." The Exiles has recently been
restored to its full glory with support from, among others, director
Charles Burnett. The Exiles shares similarities with Burnett's legendary
Killer of Sheep: both are gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized
Los Angeles communities.

 

 
Stefanie Lubkowski
Film & Concerts Press Officer
Museum of Fine arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
617-369-3687
slubkowski at mfa.org
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nativestudies-l/attachments/20080826/138356f1/attachment.html