Archive's Ross Lipman restores "The Exiles"

Ross Lipman, of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, occupies a niche within a niche: he is one of only a handful of film preservationists in the U.S. specializing in avant garde and independent cinema. Lipman's cutting edge repertoire has included maverick works such as the post-war experimental shorts of biker surrealist Kenneth Anger, the landmark gay history documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” (1984) and John Sayles’ elegiac political comedy “Return of the Secaucus 7” (1980). Lipman received a special “Film Heritage Award” from the National Society of Film Critics in 2007 for restoration efforts that included “Killer of Sheep,” Charles Burnett’s 1968 UCLA thesis film about a struggling working class family in Watts, which was released by New York-based Milestone films and became one of the best reviewed "new" American movies of 2007.

Now Milestone is gearing up to release another of Lipman's labors of love, the recently rediscovered “dramatized documentary” “The Exiles,” a slice of both Los Angeles and Native American history and a landmark of rock-ribbed independent moviemaking. The film begins a nine-day run, August 15-23, at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood, the Archive’s first extended booking of a movie they have restored.

“This is what restoration is all about,” says Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. "Watching this portrait of Native Americans adrift in an urban world, at a time when they were invisible to much of America, is nothing short of a revelation. The Archive is privileged to resurrect this remarkable film from the dustbin of history."

Docu-drama about Native Americans stranded in a big city

“The Exiles” was a true ultra-indie, one of the very first, completed just two years after John Cassavetes’ groundbreaking “Shadows” (1959). Shot on weekends over a period of three years, on location in the declining Bunker Hill neighborhood and elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, the movie was a work of stubborn cinematic idealism by first-time director Kent Mackenzie and a group of friends, all recent film school graduates. An unflinching look at a depressed urban enclave of Native Americans, men and women who have left the reservation in search of work and now feel like stranded exiles in the big city, the film was made without a script based upon interviews Mackenzie conducted with the non-professionals in his ensemble-cast. "[The Exiles is] a almost docudrama,” Ross Lipman suggests, “in the sense that non-actors play characters based on their own lives. The voice-overs they recorded also approach straight biographical testimony."

Mackenzie is generally credited with only two other films completed before his untimely death in 1980, a documentary short about the Bunker Hill area, and the feature “Saturday Morning” (1971).

Creative experience prepared Lipman for his unique specialty

Ross Lipman is unusually well-positioned to appreciate the achievement of an original like Kent Mackenzie: A highly regarded experimental filmmaker in his own right, his works have been presented by Film Forum Los Angeles, various international festivals and the Anthology Film Archive in Manhattan. "A number of the films I'd made had used experimental printing and processing techniques," Lipman says, "so I had a rather specialized technical vocabulary before I started working in preservation, one that lent itself to the work."

Lipman says he was attracted to UCLA initially by the reputation of pioneering Preservation Officer Emeritus Robert Gitt, "and the tradition he established of preserving films to the highest degree and quality possible." And Lipman's timing was just about perfect: when he joined the Archive in 1999, Lipman says, "They had just received a grant from the Sundance Foundation to preserve independent cinema. The films were considered important but hadn't been preserved on a large scale before. The technical challenge of taking these low budget productions and giving them the full laboratory treatment, doting over every frame and second of sound for months and months on end, that was something I was well-prepared to take on."

Important stories that need to be told

Like “Killer of Sheep,” Lipman believes, “'The Exiles' is a story that had to be told, with incredibly evocative photography of the Bunker Hill neighborhood and street life. It documents a lost period of Los Angeles history—both architecture, and lives. 'The Exiles' is an incredibly well-made and compelling story by a great unknown filmmaker. It's very exciting to be able help a film this good finally reach the audience it deserves."

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Keywords

"ross lipman" "the exiles" "kent mackenzie" "jan christopher horak" "ucla film & television archive" "ucla film archive" 

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