Charles Burnett: A Reconsideration of Third Cinema

Amy Abugo Ongiri _ Journal of Contemporary African Art "and every story will end badly" A frican American history as marked by violence has always been strikingly visual. In her assessment of the mix of violence and entertainment that create "the abject fact of blackness ," Elizabeth Alexander reminds us that: "Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American spectacle for centuries."1 From the blaxploitation film boom of the sixties and seventies to the "hood" films of the nineties, African American visual culture has tended to negotiate the history of visuality and violence with strategies of embrace rather than refusal of violence as an aesthetic. The work of Charles Burnett has largely bucked the conventions of representation of African Americans in popular and independent film and visual culture. Burnett's first film, Killer of Sheep (1973), is set in Watts not long after the Watts Riots of 1965 but is focused on urban life rather than urban violence. The Horse (1973) revolves around a horse that needs to be put down, but the shooting is brief, off-screen, and disrupts the lyrical quality of the film. The Glass Shield (1994) concerns police brutality, and its violence is depicted as institutional and systemic rather than spectacularized in the manner of Hollywood. The recent revival of strategies of hyperviolence in art-house cinema and the controversy it has provoked draw attention to the work of Charles Burnett and its relationship to violence as an aesthetic and political choice. My exploration of the refusal of violence in the work of Charles Burnett necessarily begins in two very different symbolic and geographic territories with the opening sequence from the 1977 Haile Gerima film Bush Mama and a quote from the 1999 Virginie Depensetes novel Baise-Moi in order to explore the notions that govern the display of violence as well as some of the presumptions that govern its use as a tool of political subversion. The opening sequence of Bush Mama is legendary for the story behind the story it tells. The film opens as the film's main character (Barbara O. Jones) walks down a busy urban street in the Watts section of Los Angeles. The chaos of the street is heightened by the camera's quick cutting between the action of the street as well as the main characters' obvious preoccupation with other things. In the background of this chaotic street scene that sets the stage for the telling of the film's main story, the police stop a group of African American men and forcefully search them and their car. This group of young men is none other than the actual film crew stopped by policemen who thought it "suspicious" that such a group of young African American men would possess expensive camera equipment. The intrepid cinematographer and cameraman Charles Burnett captured the entire incident on film as it unfolded as if to substantiate Haile Gerima's claim that African American cinema "must be umbilically linked to the community from which it comes."2 Thus the film documents in reality the degradation and humiliation that it claims to represent fictionally through the story of a young black family caught in the throes of black urban despair. Bush Mama is subsequently dependant on a mix of real-time police violence and the fictionalized abstract violence of the narrative so that rather than just represent black life, the images of the film begin to exist as history made evident through the image of violence. The film, whose crew included not only Burnett but also Larry Clark (Passing Through) and Barbara O. Jones (Daughters of the Dust), remaps the urban streets recently made visible by the Watts riots in 1965 and a general crisis in urbanity that saw the cities shift from the site of progressive modernity to the site of violent disorder, decay, and racial strife as emblematized by the phenomenon of the urban riot. The Watts Riots, the largest urban uprising of its kind in the United States up to that point, signified back on black urban populations so much so that, in the words of Mark Reid, "destruction and the destructive came to define the black community ."3...