Charles Burnett’s Dialogic Aesthetics: My Brother’s Wedding as a Bridge between Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger

This article positions My Brother’s Wedding (1983) in relation to Charles Burnett’s two better-known films, Killer of Sheep (1973) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), by arguing that it takes the former’s neorealism and adds Brechtian qualities to create a dialogism between classes and generations in the African American community that are more fleshed out in the later film. The dialogism allows for a rich, pluralistic portrayal of the community, and, following Kobena Mercer’s call, it exists on the level of both style and content. My Brother’s Wedding shows Burnett evolving as an auteur from the more observational mode of Killer of Sheep to the allegory of To Sleep with Anger. It is more than just a transitional film, however; its style makes particular commentary on the state of the inner city and of young black men in the early 1980s, sounding a warning call for what was to come in the later part of that decade. Ultimately I argue for the importance of this overlooked film to understanding both Burnett’s style and worldview.