The current release of “Killer of Sheep” is most noted for its colorful history as Charles Burnett’s prodigious student project of life in the mid-1970s inner-city Los Angeles’ Watts ghetto. Burnett was raised in the South, but traveled to Los Angeles for a degree in electronics and to pursue a career as an engineer.
After his engineering school he entered the UCLA film school and produced the film as a student project. The film was shown in film festivals, notably the Berlin International in 1981, and received the Critics’ Award there in 1981. In spite of the acknowledged excellence of the work, it was not released due to the expense of clearing the sound track that contains popular artists of the time. The music was tied up in contracts with recording labels that had no interest in a students film project, regardless of its merit as a social and artistic statement.
The film echoes the unvarnished honesty of the neo-realists of the time, forever bookmarked by Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” and other works by Jean Renoir and Michelangelo Antonioni. These films used unskilled actors taken from the shooting locale and/or used local persons as extras to back-up the scripted leads. This particular film was shot on weekends in the course of about a year on a budget that was essentially non-existent. The sound track is hand picked by Burnett and includes many blues classics that most white movie-goers would hear for the first time in the context of the film.
Burnett and other black film makers of the time reacted to the popularization of the inner city black hero as a white hero with a black skin. The black man was cast as the tormented, violent hero (“Shaft”) who believes in simple solutions---a blackened John Wayne, and as the middle-class Sidney Poitier of “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.” Burnett responded with a film that showed black life in the supposedly liberated and empowered west coast cities as one endless struggle against unseen enemies of ghetto brutality and aimless childhood alienation.
The camera work in the film is studied and multi-faceted. Wandering boys kick up the dust of the forgotten byways of the forgotten Watts neighborhoods. They throw rocks at a freight train passing by and their rocks have no more impact on the train than their lives are likely to have on the city in which they live. When the last car of the train passes, they are left looking at the same ghetto as before, on the other side of the tracks.
Temporary change that leads to nothing---the mirage of change.
Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) is the lead character, a husband and father who is gradually withdrawing from life. He works in a slaughterhouse, killing sheep, and the sheep walk in and are carried out in an endless stream and the people in the film have little more presence in the community than the sheep.
Stan is engaged in an endless project to repair his kitchen floor and plumbing but we never see any progress, only a series of down low camera shots. When he and a friend buy an auto engine and place in precariously in the back of a truck, the shot is from street level looking up a steep hill. The truck may as well be climbing a tree, as the scene builds to its foregone conclusion.
The visions that float in and out of Stan’s life include his wife, friends and his neighborhood. At the local liquor store the homely white woman tries to hire him “to help out in the back.” His friends try to involve him in a half-baked murder scheme. A day at the races ends in a walk home when the car has a flat and there is no spare. His wife fights daily against the miasma that is separating them even in their conjugal bed. The two dance slowly to the blues on their radio and await the next day.
Through all this is the wafting blues tunes articulating the indomitable American black spirit, although that spirit is more present in the young than in the old. In spite of the promise of a better life someday, we are cautioned that there is no simple answer to this life. It is a survival that is earned every day.
One of the first 50 films chosen for the National Film Registry and declared a National Treasure by the Library of Congress, “Killer of Sheep” was chosen by the National Society of Film Critics in 2002 as one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time. This film will be slow for some, but is a must-see for both students of the film medium and students of American history.
Killer of Sheep
Very limited opening March 30, 2007 MPAA: Unrated
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