We will be revisiting work from this year's Honorary Oscar winners. Here's Tim on Charles Burnett...
For most of its existence, the 1977 Killer of Sheep existed more in the realm of legend than concrete film history. It was made for a paltry $10,000 by director-producer (-writer-cinemtographer-editor) Charles Burnett as his master's thesis project in UCLA, taking five years to complete. Owing to the substantial expense of securing rights to the music Burnett wished to use, the film was never able to acquire distribution, and for nearly thirty years remained more talked about than seen, though it was fiercely admired by those lucky ones who had attended a screening. It was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990, but still could only be found mostly by accident, as it flitted around the film underground on increasingly degraded 16mm prints.
In 2007, 30 years after the film was completed, the UCLA Film & Television archive finally took steps to secure the future of the film, creating a new 35mm print from the 16mm negative. Milestone Films secured the music rights for $150,000, and the film finally had its first commercial release, to enormous critical acclaim. Burnett had never stopped working, but the restoration of Killer of Sheep unquestionably brought his reputation to new heights. It's hard to imagine him receiving his honorary Oscar this year without Killer of Sheep having so triumphantly risen from the ashes.
It's a deserving end for a deserving film: Killer of Sheep is exactly the kind of film that ought to have legends written about it. The simplest way to describe it, and the way it tends to be pitched, is an Italian neorealist-style film about African-Americans in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (Burnett, born in Mississippi, gravitated towards the presence of Southern Black culture in Watts during his time at UCLA). But this is an easy, reductive way to speak about film that is never easy in the least. If Killer of Sheep is by necessity a realist film, it's because $10,000 doesn't buy a lot of non-realism. But the term "realism" hardly describes the astonishing way that Burnett assembles the moments he has recorded.
In principle, Killer of Sheep is about Stan (Henry G. Sanders), who works at a slaughterhouse, and grows ever more distant from his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Angela Burnett & Jack Drummond). In practice, it's barely fair to say that Killer of Sheep is a narrative at all; Stan and his suffocation as a poor black man in a poor black neighborhood forms the spine of the movie, but the content is a series of detached vignettes, some of which focus on Stan, some of which don't at all.
Instead, much of the film simply seems content to look at moments in the daily life of a Watts summer – this is, among its other strengths, one of the great films about the oppressive heat of an urban summer – capturing children innocently playing in startlingly unforced moments, contrasting that to the stress and anguish of the adults around them. Both of these extremes are filmed on the same rough, raw black-and-white 16mm (the only medium Burnett could afford), which provides them with an absolutely unsentimental documentary-style presence. The physical reality of Watts comes through as strongly as anything, and this is undoubtedly why the film is so readily, and rightfully, called realist cinema.
But as much as the grainy stock and artlessly arranged spaces are realist, Burnett's compositions are not those of a photojournalist. His script is even less so: Killer of Sheep proceeds in an associative fashion that verges on dream logic. It would be an exaggeration at least to claim that the images in the film are themselves dreamlike, but there is a raw, working class poetry that the director crafts from his shots, a way of forging the Watts landscape into a space of surprising moments of childish play, or of perfectly staged behaviors of adults. It's a film that extracts great beauty from the inherent ugliness of its rough stock and the impoverished landscapes, without using that beauty to tell lies about poverty or Watts or people like Stan.
The film is routinely described by (white) critics as some variation of "not just a great film about African-Americans, but a great film", which is of course true – it is a great film, among the greatest examples of cinematic realism ever made by or about Americans. But it is very important that it is specifically a great film about African-Americans. There's too much specificity in the location and the style used to capture that location to pretend that this is some sort of Grand Statement about the nature of African-Americans' social and political status in 1977; it's about Watts and Watts alone, and even then it's about a very particular vision of Watts as seen by a deeply sympathetic outsider.
More generally, though, it does serve as one of American cinema's first depiction of black life and black culture – part of the reason for that expensive soundtrack is that Burnett insisted that the film would double as an appreciation of African-American musical traditions – to be handled in such a detailed, artistically complicated way. The film tunnels into the specific rhythms of black working class life and turns what it finds there into the stuff of high art; films about working class people are rare enough, but films about working class African-Americans are virtually non-existant, and as much as Killer of Sheep is a masterpiece of cinema, it's hard to see how it could be as much of a masterpiece in any other place, any other time, and under the guidance of any other filmmaker.
previously: Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I