Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

6. “Boundaries, Burdens, and Stings”: Living as Prey in Burnett’s: Killer of Sheep

143 Despite enjoying a considerable reputation among those who know it, Charles Burnett’s first feature-length film has been little seen by movie audiences and has achieved only modest repute among film scholars and critics. This state of affairs is not surprising ; Killer of Sheep (1977) has never been commercially distributed.1 But it is regrettable; for along with the resonant, fluent To Sleep with Anger (1990), the underrated The Glass Shield (1995), and two surprisingly complex made-for-TV films (NightJohn, 1997, and The Wedding, 1999), Killer of Sheep marks Burnett as a gifted, original writer-director. The recognition achieved by Killer of Sheep, if not unprecedented for a first film, certainly signaled the debut of a major talent. It won the Critics’ Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981 and in 1990 it was among the second group of twenty-five films selected for inclusion in The National Film Registry, a Library of Congress archive of U.S. films regarded as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Burnett himself was acknowledged in 1988 with a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” 6 “Boundaries, Burdens, and Stings”: Living as Prey in Burnett’s Killer of Sheep What a strange thing meat is in the history of mankind. The leap from the flesh of prey to one’s own flesh is the enigma of all enigmas. Compassion begins with it, arising from a feeling for one’s own flesh. Today, the butchers’ shops futilely recall one’s own flesh. CANETTI, The Human Province (249) CHAPTER 6 144 Episodic in construction, Killer of Sheep runs approximately eighty minutes and consists of about thirty-five sequences, varying from as brief as fifteen seconds to more than seven minutes.2 (Different viewers will make different counts, depending upon whether they consider some closely related actions to be one or more than one sequence.) Lacking a plot with a beginning, middle, and end, it portrays a series of events that occur among the members of its central family and their neighbors. Its episodes appear to succeed one another more or less randomly; they look to be all scrambled “middle.” Killer of Sheep is organized not as a sequence of actions but of imagistic and thematic equivalencies, variations, and contrasts. Its sequential development consists of images, incidents, words, and music that progressively elaborate such themes as the relations between children and adults, humans and sheep, men and women. More abstract issues arise simultaneously: predator and prey, for example , and play and work. The development of its ideas—which does have a beginning, middle, and end—arises as much through unfolding visual and aural patterns of imagery as through the sum of characters and their actions. The opening episode of Killer of Sheep (following the imageless sound of children singing) evokes a dense, anxious set of emotions and ideas. Subsequently, the film consists largely of incidents involving the family of Stan, who works at a slaughterhouse. These incidents enlarge upon themes derived from the initial episode (which does not involve Stan’s family). The concluding sequence of Stan killing sheep, hoisting their twitching bodies, and driving more of them into the slaughterhouse summarizes much of the film, both in its imagery and its music. At the thematic center of Burnett’s film are actions and images of packs, predation, and transformation. Since Killer of Sheep is not frequently shown and is currently unavailable on video, some description may be useful. It opens with an extreme close-up of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy being upbraided by his father for not coming to the aid of his brother in a fight. The boy is then slapped by a pregnant woman, evidently his young mother. After the film title and the director credit, Burnett cuts to a group of early adolescent boys having a dirt-fight by railroad tracks. In the next sequence, they chase and throw stones at a passing freight train, hang out along the right-of-way, and futilely try to push a single boxcar over a boy who lies with his head on the Living as Prey in Burnett’s Killer of Sheep 145 tracks. Stan Jr., the son of the title character, leaves to fetch his BB gun. Approaching his home through the alley, he witnesses two young men stealing a television. There follows a long sequence of Stan and several friends in the kitchen, then one of him...