1.
I judge films by the memories that they create in me. Charles Burnett’s film Killer of Sheep (1977) was known to critics and film students and, indeed, highly regarded. But, for many years, it could not be seen. In 2007, the film was re-released and, I think, I saw it on DVD about five years ago. The movie doesn’t have a story and I couldn’t discern its structure, but, nonetheless, I often found myself thinking about the film. I recalled tunes from the picture and a sequence modeled on Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box involving two men lugging an immensely heavy engine block down a precarious flight of steps. Certain images remained stuck in my imagination. I also thought the film was astoundingly accurate to life, at least, true to the kind of life that I had experienced when I was a child. This is an odd assertion since I am a middle class White man raised in the suburbs and the film chronicles episodes in the lives of African-Americans living in Watts a decade after the riots in that ghetto. But certain rituals and aspects of childhood are, apparently, universal and the way that Burnett portrays these things rings true: the constant play-violence, the use of stones and dirt-clods as toys, the bicycles, the crowds of children doing things that would appall their parents, the forts in vacant lots, the unpredictable stray dogs, and the general dreamy squalor of childhood, all of this is shown in Killer of Sheep with lyrical precision and beauty. I remembered the film with affection and wished to see it again.
Hollywood is a dream factory and most movies trade in wish-fulfillment, enacting the consummation of desires that these films also induce in us. (In real life, I have no desire to see a tanker truck obliterate a dune buggy armed with razor-like appendages for slitting tires. But when watching George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road the film creates in me a wish to see such a spectacle and, then, fulfills that wish.) Burnett’s Killer of Sheep seems to be about real life and the way that dreams are not fulfilled. In this way, the movie presents us with a vision that is the opposite of Hollywood’s perspective, an account of living as bitterness suffused with moments of joy and beauty.
2.
Charles Burnett is sometimes described as America’s greatest Black film maker. His pictures espouse a strong, persistent morality rooted in Burnett’s origins in the Deep South, but his work is neither didactic nor polemical. Contrasted with Burnett’s subtle and inconclusive films, the work of the more famous African-American director, Spike Lee, seems shrill and strident. Because his films can not be reduced to political slogans, Burnett has never enjoyed a large public and he has only been able to complete a few pictures.
Burnett was born in Vicksburg in 1944. When he was a boy, his family, like the families of many southern Blacks, migrated to Los Angeles. Burnett recalls that South Central and Watts were like southern villages transplanted into the Los Angeles basin. By most standards, Burnett’s family and the area where they lived was impoverished. However, as shown in the film the people didn’t think of themselves as poor – they had come from much more desperate circumstances, most of the men had jobs, and as Stan says in Killer of Sheep "could give stuff away to the Salvation Army" which meant that they were not poor. (Stan’s problem in the film is not economic, but existential – he is bored and depressed.)
At first, Burnett went to LA City College and studied to be an electrician. He wasn’t well-suited to the job and attended UCLA where he took creative writing classes. After the Watts riots in 1965, UCLA was the center of something called the Black Independent Film Movement, a group of young men and women who made documentary-influenced pictures about African American life. These young people were influenced heavily by one of their teachers, Basil Wright, a British emigre who had made many important documentaries in the United Kingdom about lower middle class life. Wright, a Communist, had formed the Third World Film Club devoted to screening movies from Cuba, South America, and Africa. The members of this film club became the nucleus of the Black Independent Film Movement. Shot in 1977, Killer of Sheep is an example of one of the pictures made by Movement members. Burnett wrote the script for another prominent Movement film, directed by a friend, Billy Woodberry, Bless their Little Hearts (1984). Burnett was the director of photography on another important Movement picture, Bush Mama (1979) about police brutality.
3.
Burnett was entrusted with the use of a 16 mm. camera owned by the UCLA film school and used that equipment to shoot Killer of Sheep. He cast friends and acquaintances from his neighborhood in the movie. All of the leading actors were film students or enrolled in UCLA theater programs. (The actor playing Stan, Henry Sanders, a Vietnam veteran then studying theater at UCLA, remains active in character roles mostly on TV and has had many credits; the woman playing his unnamed wife has also appeared in several films. None of the other players had any professional aspirations – they don’t appear in any other movies.) Burnett recalled that his only expense was film stock. He estimated the cost of the movie as "less than $10,000." Editing equipment and lights were supplied by UCLA. Burnett’s script was submitted to UCLA as his Masters Thesis in the film making program and earned him a degree.
Local slaughterhouses in Los Angeles were sensitive to "protests by vegetarians" Burnett recalls and so he shot the packing plant footage over one weekend at Solano Meats, a place actually located north of San Francisco. The movie took several years to produce because all of the performers had jobs and shooting could only be accomplished on weekends and, then, only when Burnett had money sufficient to develop the film. (Delay occurred as well because one of the main characters went to jail for several months and production was halted until this man was released.) None of the actors were paid for their services.
Burnett recorded an elaborate soundtrack comprised of Blues and Soul music that was popular at the time that the film was produced. This soundtrack, integral to the movie, proved to be its downfall. Burnett couldn’t acquire the rights to any of the music heard in the movie and so was legally prohibited from showing the film for profit. As a consequence, the movie toured only briefly and was shown with no admission charged at museums and Black churches. The picture could not be commercially released and so Killer of Sheep was shelved.
Burnett assumed that the 16 mm. negative of the film was in a climate-controlled vault at UCLA. In 2006, he discovered to his horror that the negative was not in a climate-controlled environment and that his film was rotting. When he approached the UCLA film school with this information, a petition was made to the National Registry for funds to preserve this movie as well as other pictures created by the Black Independent Film Movement. The movie was carefully restored by UCLA preservationists and blown-up to 35 mm. so that it could be theatrically premiered. The director Steven Soderburgh donated the $150,000 necessary to secure rights to the music featured in the film. Killer of Sheep was shown for the first time commercially in L.A. and New York in 2007. A DVD was produced of the film and the picture was immediately hailed by many critics as one of the ten best pictures released in 2007.
4.
Why haven’t you heard of Charles Burnett? And why aren’t you familiar with his films?
Although Burnett has worked on films assiduously for 40 years, success has eluded him. Burnett’s movies are always underfunded, almost never advertised, and released with stealth – ordinarily premiering in only a half dozen or so theaters and, then, vanishing. Three reasons account for Burnett’s lack of conventional success in the movie industry.
First, Burnett is an African-American who directs movies about African-American themes. Racism remains powerful in this country and, no doubt, Burnett has been the victim of institutional prejudice throughout his career. Type-cast as a director of dignified, didactic movies for Black audiences, Burnett has been shoved into a kind of cinematic ghetto – he doesn’t make the raunchy, vulgar comedies that have made Tyler Perry wealthy, nor is he willing to indulge in exploitation pictures targeted at disenfranchised teenagers and young men. Finally, he is less politically astute than Spike Lee. Lee uses fiery rhetoric, but produces movies that are subtle and thoughtful, often contradicting the director’s own statements about those films. Burnett is relatively unassuming, rarely makes political comments, and his films about race, as complex as Lee’s work, don’t receive the hype that attends the Brooklyn director’s films – Burnett isn’t seen at basketball games and hasn’t made commercials for sneakers like Lee.
Second, Burnett’s movies are regarded as without commercial value – in an industry geared to producing pictures involving super heros or low-budget horror films or comedies starring SNL stars, Burnett’s relatively quiet and pensive films are drowned-out by the digital din. An example is Burnett’s brilliant and jazz-inspired To Sleep with Anger (1990). In that film, the devil in the form of a Southern conjure-man played by Danny Glover comes to Watts and tempts the members of a family – the movie is uncanny, beautifully acted and filmed, and expresses a morality intrinsic to the African-American church. But it’s not an easy sell – there are no special effects, no one gets killed, and Danny Glover’s tempter is all unctuous easy-going charm; he is menacing because he is so attractive and likeable. Although the movie is a profound portrait of evil, the picture doesn’t have readily identifiable villains – even the Devil is ambiguous in his motivation. (The film ends with the suggestion that the Devil exists to keep us practicing our moral ‘chops’ – the movie’s presiding metaphor involves a boy practicing jazz riffs on his cornet. Even the Devil, in the end, contributes to our growth and wisdom – if we have to practice virtue, one day we will be "good.") This picture was one of the best of the decade but it was released on only 18 screens nationwide. And this was notwithstanding overwhelmingly positive reviews in prestigious magazines and newspapers. A similar problem befell Burnett’s The Glass Shield – a police film involving a young Black officers who learns that his fellow officers are corrupt. Burnett doesn’t use foul language in his films, scrupulously avoids gratuitous violence, and rarely shows sex – it’s as if he wants his films to be accessible to a broad and church-going public, probably because his intentions are generally didactic. The Glass Shield is very tightly scripted, plausible, and a realistic portrait of the subculture of policing. But because it lacks car chases and gun battles, the film was essentially unmarketable – you can’t make an effective cineplex trailer about someone’s gradual moral awakening.
Furthermore, several of Burnett’s most impressive productions were made for the Disney channel, that is for television. These include the alarming and cruel ‘Nightjohn (1990) about literacy, and the attempt to repress it, in slaves on a plantation in the Deep South. Intensely dramatic and powerful, the film is intended to convey a lesson – the importance of reading and writing. The TV show, handsomely produced and impressively mounted (it stars among others Beau Bridges) suffered in its prestige precisely for the reason that it was accounted a children’s film made by Disney. Another TV film made for Disney also is highly regarded, Selma, Lord, Selma (1999) – this picture depicts a 14-year old girl’s participation in the Civil Rights March on Selma. The film won about every award a TV show can win. But have you seen it?
The third factor confounding Burnett is a simple, but distressing one: the quality of his movies is highly variable. He has made some of the best American pictures produced in the last forty years. And he has made some of the worst, and most embarrassing, failures as well. The trend began as early as Burnett’s second feature film, My Brother’s Wedding, shot in 35 mm. color and (barely) released in 1983. In this film, Burnett’s attempts at comedy fail miserably and his eccentric characters seem merely whimsical. Burnett seems to have lost his touch with non-professional actors – the line readings seem almost phonetic and the characters either over-act or woodenly recite their lines, blinking nervously at the camera. In 2001, Burnett directed a romantic comedy starring Lynn Redgrave and James Earl Jones called The Annilihation of Fish. The film involves an interracial romance between two people with serious mental illness. The movie had its world-premiere at the Twin Cities film festival and was shown at the Parkway Theater in north Minneapolis. Local critics were respectful. But the national press was merciless in its reviews of the film and it has totally vanished – indeed, even websites connected with the film seem to have evaporated and the links are all broken. No one has seen Burnett’s epic film, Namibia, the Struggle of Liberation (2007) – the picture was shot in Namibia with over 200 speaking parts, but most of the actors and actresses used differing dialects (or spoke entirely different languages) and it is said that no one could understand anyone else on the set. I suspect that the film is also a catastrophe.
5.
Although Killer of Sheep is generally accounted a film about racism, I think this interpretation is wrong. First, there are very few White people in the film and they have only peripheral roles in the narrative. Second, the film doesn’t feel angry. Burnett is not an angry film maker by temperament; rather, he is a cool, jazz-inflected analytical director at his best, somewhat like a Southern Black Brecht. In my view, Killer of Sheep is about melancholia and loneliness. In this respect, Killer of Sheep is probably more closely akin to European art films of the era – movies like Antonioni’s L’Eclisse or The Red Desert or the movies that Bergman was making at this time. (Burnet would deny these influences – he asserts that the film makers that he most admired at the time he made the movie were Basil Wright and Jean Renoir: Burnett says that he was influenced by Wright’s Song of Ceylon and Renoir’s The Southerner.) Stan, the titular character, is an unhappy man. And, in significant part, the film is about Stan’s attempts to deal with his sadness.
As classically imagined, melancholy involves the mind ranging outward and encountering only obstacles to thought. Melancholy is a restless disposition. Burnett’s film profits from the sorrow that Henry Sanders, the lead actor felt after returning from a "harrowing" tour of duty in Vietnam. Sanders, as Stan, seems unable to find anything that gives him pleasure. The sense that the world is inhospitable to him is made emblematic in the central sequence, a set-piece involving an attempt to salvage an engine. The engine is immensely heavy and Burnett stages the scene to emphasize the frightening weight of the engine block. An engine is a thing that drives a car and that might offer some escape for the characters in the film. But the engine block turns out to be too heavy to rescue and is left in the gutter. (The scene derives some of its resonance from a similar film: the famous Oscar-winning short by Laurel and Hardy involving two men trying to move a piano up an enormous flight of stairs – an absurdist enterprise like something imagined by Beckett that turns out to be totally unnecessary.) The savage weight of Burnett’s world is exemplified in the freight car that the children, training for adulthood, try to push unsuccessfully. The little kids are always in danger of being crushed – consider that one of their playgrounds is a construction site has been jacked-up to perch absurdly on stilts. The world is full of objects and these objects are malicious. Tires go flat and can’t be changed. Sheep have to be killed and their guts carted away. The children who seem to be learning to fly, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, alone are exempt from the desolate and slightly comical sense of things that are too heavy, weariness, a great opaque weight pressing down on the earth, the entropic force that makes things break apart and collapse.
When the film was restored in 2007, the rights to only one song were inaccessible. But this was the most important song, Irving Gordon’s "Unforgettable" played during the scene in which Stan dances with his wife near the end of the film. Instead, Burnett substituted "This Bitter Earth" by Dinah Washington. Some films are fortunate even with respect to accidents that befall them. Dinah Washington’s lament, played at the end of the film, greatly enhances the movie’s power.
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