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Kent Mackenzie, 34, a Californian, got his $10,000 by submitting three pictures with a total running time of one hour and 54 minutes. Two of Mackenzie's films are good, straightforward documentaries, one on a rodeo cowboy and the other on old people doomed to lose their homes to urban redevelopment in Los Angeles. But his really arresting accomplishment is a semidocumentary, full-length feature called The Exiles, a picture about American Indians as they live in Los Angeles today. Played by amateur actors like Delos Yellow Eagle and Frankie Red Elk, The Exiles slices a depressing day out of a set of static and pointless lives, showing a lost people who imitate the language of Negroes as if in aspiration to belong to a higher-echelon minority. They lie around in their grimy pads listening to westerns on TV with lines like "reckon that'll teach them moonfaced Indians to have more respect for a white man." Or they drive to a rubbly hilltop and hold war dances with jugs of wine, the galactic lights of the city spread below.
Carmen D'Avino, 45, whose Pianissimo has been nominated for an Academy Award this year as best short subject, is a painter who learned cinematography as a photographer-historian during World War II. His films are painstaking creations in color, shot frame by frame, with meticulous painting done between shots. Pianissimo is about a player piano. The keys are all white. It starts to play. As each key hits a note it acquires a color as well, until the whole keyboard looks like a Mediterranean awning. D'Avino goes on coloring everything in sight, including the punched-out player roll itself. The colors grow and move quite magically. In Stone Sonata, he moves stones around a stream bed, coloring them as he goes along in varied patterns that suggest the work of a Hopi Indian, always shooting a frame at a time, creating an imaginative suggestion of stones alive in nature, a reason-be-damned admixture of the commonplace with the impossible. This technique works best of all in The Room. It is an abysmally shabby Greenwich Village flat, filthy and gloomy, with plaster fallen off the walls. Suddenly color begins appearing. The room paints itself in wild patterns and uninhibited blazes of Latin shades. It is a resurrection in primary hues.
James Blue, 33, turned in a surprising entry. After all the six-minute adolescent pornies, the sober documentaries, and the truly artful short work of men like D'Avino, along comes Blue from Portland, Ore., with a full-length feature called The Olive Trees of Justice. Beautifully directed by Blue, beautifully acted by unknowns, it was made in Algeria three years ago. It is entirely in French, with French subtitles when the Arabs talk. Blue learned French as a student at the Paris Institute. He made Olive Trees for the French Government. It is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race. A young French Algerian broods beside his father's deathbed about his childhood, seen in flashback, and what is left of that fine early life in Algeria now. Something is left. He decides that he must go on living there.