“The old people remember the past,” a narrator says early in The Exiles, over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of aged Native Americans who may have had their lands taken away but not their history or memories. For the length of Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 feature, the past is not distant: It’s vital, concrete, immediate — a record of vanished sites and vanquished dreams suspended in an eternally looped present. Thanks to a superlative restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the distribution efforts of Milestone Films (who partnered last year to release Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep), this 50-year-old film about a Los Angeles neighborhood on the skids and its barely tethered dwellers stands as the freshest movie now in theaters.

(Click to enlarge)

Off the reservation

By the standards of The Incredible Hulk or Wanted — buzzing CG pixel storms in which lives, locations and bodies exist in perpetual zero gravity — The Exiles may not seem that exciting. An account of 14 dusk-to-dawn hours in a community of scuffling Native Americans — the once-prosperous Bunker Hill — it unfolds without artificial urgency or hyped-up climaxes; it’s acted with unpolished conviction by neighborhood residents the British-born director met in the mid-’50s while researching a documentary. But Mackenzie (who died in 1980 at age 50, after making just one other feature) had an ear for the poetry of ritualized interaction, and an eye for the glint of hard light on city streets. The movie walks a night world so crackling with unfocused energy — so alive with threat, promise and raw, honking rock & roll, yet so limited in any sense of a future — that to enter it is to feel your blood surge. Even so, after its premiere at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, The Exiles never received an official release.

Like other mostly forgotten features, including Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil (1973) and Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man (1972), The Exiles was plucked from obscurity by a shout-out in Thom Andersen’s 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself. In that expansive meditation on cinematic geography and the coded history lessons of film, Andersen held up The Exiles as a particularly evocative example of location shooting, the spiritual forebear of Killer of Sheep and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts — films about the “outside” told from the inside. “The cinema of walking,” Andersen called it — when one of the film’s main characters, Yvonne, a lonely, pregnant Apache woman played by Yvonne Williams, trudges home after a night of dissatisfied window shopping, the camera takes in her real-life surroundings at the same pace, situating fiction within docu-realism.

Started in 1958 and completed in 1961 — a period encompassing the nouvelle vague’s initial shock waves a world away, and roughly coinciding with the similar efforts of John Cassavetes, Lionel Rogosin and Morris Engel at home — The Exiles offers possibilities for semidoc narrative feature-making that extend beyond miserabilism or Andersen’s derided “low-tourist” rubbernecking. Mackenzie conceived it as a film about the relocation of late-generation Native Americans from the reservation to the city. Beginning with a bluntly sociological prologue — the one dated element — the movie charts a diaspora in microcosm. Yvonne shares two rooms with her Hualapai husband, Homer (Homer Nish), a beefy rounder with slicked-back Elvis hair and a sudden look of quizzical hurt; his wolfish mixed-Mexican buddy Tommy (Tom Reynolds); and four other men who crash there and filch cigarettes. The guys ditch Yvonne at a double feature, then disperse like seeds into the night — Homer to a poker game for easy dough that doesn’t pan out, Tommy to a joy ride with a Choctaw bud and two thrill-seeking floozies.

Even in the city, there are reservations. The bar of choice, the Ritz, is a shrunken Native American nation where the displaced tribesmen meet before retiring to smaller groups and private spaces. (Their women serve as child-keepers and ATMs: Mackenzie watches without judgment as the guys habitually raid their wives’ purses and split.) In Mackenzie’s vision, no one here is beneath notice — not the grizzled regular reading a pamphlet at the bar, who’s held for just a beat after the heroes leave; not the clerk who gives Yvonne a sullen look as she leaves the Grand Central Market without buying anything in the first scene. We’re left to wonder where their stories lead.

Deepening our involvement with the characters are the voice-overs they deliver on the soundtrack: documentary interjections that float above the street noise, music and dialogue below. Independent of the action onscreen, they give the movie’s semidoc authenticity another layer of reality. “I haven’t started drinking or hanging around Main Street yet,” Yvonne says offscreen, as the camera watches her make her way home through the neon mousetraps of Bunker Hill. The “yet” in that sentence typifies the movie’s profound sense of the indefinite.

The most immediately striking thing about The Exiles, shot through with humor and nerve and keyed to the throb of Anthony Hilder and the Revels’ thrillingly seedy garage rock, is its look. The black-and-white camerawork (by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morrill) is so starkly high-contrast that the outdoor shots have the muscular definition of a graphic novel. The black has surprising depth, catching hard edges within shadows; the white burns a halo around every liquor-store sign or streetlight.

“You could call [The Exiles] independent,” Andersen wisecracked, slinging an elbow at the deep-pocketed Miramax “indie,” “but you couldn’t call it ‘pulp fiction.’” Yet, the area that Yvonne, Tommy, Homer and their many friends wander is a literal film noir neighborhood: Its crooked angles and night-splitting neon also served as the backdrop for the atom-age apocalypse of 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly. It’s also film noir in that the city is inevitable, inescapable. As in Mean Streets and American Graffiti, two films about the confinement of community that seem influenced by The Exiles’ incidental sprawl, every night out or stroll away circles back to the neighborhood. Even when Tommy gets behind the wheel of a car — in a sequence that’s pure foot-to-pedal exhilaration, all whipping hair, cranking tunes and gear-jamming low angles — he’s back by daybreak. And the cycle of mooching, scuffling and hanging starts all over again, on to the next dawn.

THE EXILES | Written, produced and directed by KENT MACKENZIE | Released by Milestone Films | UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater | Through Sat., Aug. 23 | www.cinema.ucla.edu

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.