Charles Burnett: Interviews

An Explorer of the Black Mind Looks Back, but Not in Anger

95 An Explorer of the Black Mind Looks Back, but Not in Anger Michael Sragow/1995 From the New York Times, January 1, 1995. © 1995 The New York Times. All rights reserved . Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited. “Faulkner put race on the table,” Charles Burnett says, “and he was aware of the black psychology. The right to exist, how to exist, the power to endure were always part of his theme.” Mr. Burnett, a forty-nine-year-old movie maker who grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles, has Mississippi roots and an expansive cultural perspective. As Carl Lumbly, who co-starred in Mr. Burnett’s best-known feature, the 1990 film To Sleep with Anger, puts it: “Too often a director’s reference points are films or television: ‘Give me Ralph Kramden.’ Charles can take you to a particular moment in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens will hold a retrospective of Mr. Burnett’s first three films and a preview of his fourth, The Glass Shield, on Saturday and next Sunday. Because Mr. Burnett has made so few pictures, each new one is definitely an occasion for supporters of black independent film. Miramax will release The Glass Shield later this year The movie stars Michael Boatman as a black rookie and Lori Petty as a Jewish deputy who run up against racism and anti-Semitism as they expose police wrongdoing in Los Angeles. Like all of Mr. Burnett’s movies, The Glass Shield was done on the cheap; nevertheless, it tries to blend realism and splashy stylization. It marks a transition for the 96 charles burnett: inter views director. After two decades of making art films, Mr. Burnett is trying to appeal to a wider audience. The Glass Shield follows a trail of corruption to government ranks while exploring the idea that blacks lead double lives. Mr. Burnett was drawn to the plight of the black police officer because he—like Frederick Douglass (a possible future film subject) and Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August—exists “in a white world and a black world at the same time.” Faulkner, says Mr. Burnett, understood how people with a foot in each world are forced to adjust, “how it affects their speech when they’re in one or the other.” What bothers Mr. Burnett is that black film directors have not been able to further the esthetic frontiers that were pioneered by black writers in the twenties and thirties. “We’re sixty years behind the Harlem Renaissance,” he says. “We’re not even dealing with those issues of the language and psychology of a black person, man or woman.” Mr. Burnett notes that while the members of the Harlem Renaissance were reacting against the tradition of “having to write from a white perspective about black people for a white audience,” black filmmakers today are still hemmed in by the dictates of a white industry. “Why do blacks make so many violent films?” he asks. “Because that’s the kind that sells. You can’t talk about integrating black folklore and oral traditions and jazz when you’re in a pitch meeting.” Mr. Burnett has found a certain freedom outside the mainstream. He has no desire to grandstand. He does not want to be Spike Lee, or even the anti-Spike. “I want to be able to walk down the street and observe people without people observing me,” he says. In three films made with the frayed end of a shoestring, Mr. Burnett has explored untapped areas of black life. Killer of Sheep (completed in 1974) is a poetic evocation of working-class life in and around the Watts area of South Central Los Angeles. In 1990, Mr. Burnett’s no-budget film became one of the first fifty movies listed by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry. Working again with amateur or fledgling actors, he wrote and directed My Brother’s Wedding (1983), a comedy-drama about a young man torn between the self-destructive street life and the sometimes-phony upward mobility within black communities in Los Angeles. Mr. Burnett won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1988, giving him $275,000 over five years. Even with the prestige of a “genius” grant, it wasn’t easy for Mr. [18.224.93...