From the color newsreel, “A Street of Memory.”
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"There Will Be Blood."
From Maren Ade to Terry Zwigoff, there are close to 100 directors who did exceptional work over the past decade yet don’t have a film on Affllictor’s Top 20 Films of the Aughts list. But the difficult paring-down process is complete. In alphabetical order, here are the lucky devils who made the grade:
- 4 (Ilya Khrjanovsky)
- Capturing the Friedmans (Eugene Jarecki)
- The Devil and Daniel Johnston (Jeff Feuerzeig)
- Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen)
- The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda)
- Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
- A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
- Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson)
- Memento(Christopher Nolan)
- Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho)
- Oldboy (Park Chan-wook)
- The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
- Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring (Kim Ki-duk)
- Talk to Her(Pedro Almodóvar)
- There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
- Time Out (Laurent Cantet)
- Together (Lukas Moodysson)
- Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)
- The World (Jia Zhangke)
Tags: Agnes Varda, Bela Tarr, Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, Dover Koshashvili, Eugene Jarecki, Ilya Khrjanovsky, Jean-Pierre, Jeff Feuerzeig, Ki-duk Kim, Laurent Cantet, Luc Dardenne, Lukas Moodysson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Pedro Almodóvar, Thom Anderson, Wen Jiang, Werner Herzog, Zhang Ke Jia
Tommy Reynolds (left) and Homer Nish.
British expat director Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 neorealist drama, The Exiles, played at the Venice and San Francisco film festivals, but it never received a proper threatrical release until 2008. Even now, this story about young Indians (as they were called then) trading in life on an Arizona reservation for a marginal existence in Los Angeles, feels strange enough to deny classification. It’s part ethnography, part urban history. part early-rock-era free-for-all. MacKenzie and his brilliant cinematographer Erik Daarstad follow the characters (all played by Indian non-actors) as they drink, gamble, carouse and brawl their way through a 12-hour night. (Cassavetes was shooting Shadows in Manhattan at roughly the same time, and both films share a freewheeling, improvisational look at hell-raising machismo.) The director refused to idealize his subjects, believing he had made an existential film rather than an Indian one.
MacKenzie died at age 50 and made just one other feature, but this film is an impressive legacy and Milestone has done an excellent job on the DVD. Also included in the extras is MacKenzie’s “Bunker Hill: 1956,” a 17-minute documentary about elderly pensioners gingerly making their way through life in a neighborhood marked for demolition and renovation. It’s an absolute treasure for the urban anthropologist. Just as much as the main feature, it confirms what documentarian Thom Andersen said of Exiles, “It proves that there was once a real city here before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.”
ALSO:
- The Exiles official site.
- Milestone’s official site.
- On Bunker Hill: A Lost Neighborhood Found site.
- Manohla Dargis’ 2008 review of Exiles, The.
- Moreabout Thom Andersen.