Lost Los Angeles "The Exiles" Screens

Sat, Nov 12
8:00PM
$10

Lost Los Angeles
"The Exiles" Screens This Saturday

Anyone who's ever seen Thom Andersen's extended riff on LA in "Los
Angeles Plays Itself"(recently screened at the Roxie in SF)
knows about Kent MacKenzie's brilliantly atmospheric and hauntingly
moody film "The Exiles". On Saturday, November 12th at 8:00 PM
Oddball Film+Video will present a rare screening of MacKenzie's "The
Exiles". Admission is $10.00, seating is limited so RSVP's are
essential. You can RSVP to or phone 415.558.8117.
Reminiscent of Cassavettes "Shadows", "The Exiles"(evocatively
photographed by Erik Daarstad) captures the lost Los Angeles area of
Bunker Hill in an all night dusk-dawn improvisational style. It
evokes free-wheeling, free spiritedness as well as lonlieness and
uncertainly, capturing the essence of Los Angeles as it was one night
in 1961 for a band of American Indians.
The 16mm print of this film was supplied by the San Francisco Media
Archive. All proceeds benefit the archive.

"Kent MacKenzie discovered Bunker Hill, the low-rent residential
neighborhood on the west edge of downtown Los Angeles, in the
mid-1950s when he was a film student at USC and it was first
threatened with demolition. He also became fascinated with a
subculture of Arizona Indians living there, and made them the subject
of a semi-documentary short feature he called The Exiles. Filming in
35mm, MacKenzie wasn't able to record dialogue on location, so he
relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voiceovers to
tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn. It is a
night full of loneliness and yearning, petty betrayals and
disappointments, and little flashes of happiness, ending with an
attempt to revive old ceremonies and solidarities on a hilltop above
the city. The Exiles is a wrenching document of cultural dislocation
and a remarkable record of a city that has vanished. In the late
1950s, it was still possible to think that all elements of society
could share downtown Los Angeles. Since then, Los Angeles has become
more segregated, and its downtown has been remolded over and over in
efforts at gentrification that have never quite taken hold. The
unassimilated, although pushed more and more to the margins, have
continued to uphold their claims to its space".

-Thom Andersen
Director of "Los Angels Plays Itself"


For more information and reviews of "The Exiles" check the following
links.

www.brightlightsfilm.com/47/exiles.htm
movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=90742
www.sfbg.com/38/35/art_film_andersen.html

Venue:

Oddball Film+Video
275 Capp Street
San Francisco
415.558.8117
www.oddballfilm.com

Off Mission between 17th and 18th, Mission and South Van Ness, closer
to 18th Street.

Additional Info:

415.558.8117
www.oddballfilm.com