April 6 - Kent Mackenzie

Happy Birthday, Kent Mackenzie! Born today in 1930 as Kent Robert Mackenzie, this English editor, cinematographer, screenwriter, producer and director is mainly remembered for his best known film.

This was the 1961 American black and white drama/documentary film 'The Exiles'. He co-edited, wrote and produced it as well. 

  

The film is set in a Native American neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. Homer (Homer Nish) lives with his pregnant wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), in a crowded apartment.  

  

While Homer goes drinking with his friend Tommy (Tom Reynolds), Yvonne is left at a movie by herself. 

As the men get progressively inebriated, Yvonne realizes that her husband is not coming home.  

  

Meanwhile, Homer and Tommy wander through the nighttime city, looking for fights, playing poker and discussing their problems as Native Americans. 

  

With a runtime of seventy minutes, 'The Exiles' is an astonishing slice of cinéma vérité at a time when young filmmakers were trying to break the Hollywood habit in favor of the real world. 

The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects. 

  

In later years, he worked as an editor on television documentaries and medical and industrial films and shorts. 

During the 1960s and 1970s, he taught filmmaking to high school classes.  

He also directed some education films for Dimension Films. This included the eleven-minute 1978 American non-fiction documentary film 'Can a Parent Be Human?' 

Since the mid-1970s, Mackenzie suffered from seizures. He passed on May 16, 1980 in Marin County, California as a result of his medication and related complications. Mackenzie was 50. 

In 2009, 'The Exiles' was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant and will be preserved for all time. 

Mackenzie had been active from the 1950s to the 1970s. 

  

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