Charles Burnett: Interviews

Burnett Looks Back

100 Burnett Looks Back Amy Taubin/1995 Published in the Village Voice, January 10, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author. In 1990, Charles Burnett officially became a national treasure when his first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), was designated by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant and worthy of preservation.” In its six years, the film registry has selected 150 films: Killer of Sheep is within its purview, but so too is The Birth of a Nation. Honors aside, Burnett is one of the two greatest African American directors, the other being Spike Lee. Unlike Lee, whose politics impel him into the Hollywood arena, Burnett, although based in Los Angeles, has made all of his films within the independent sector. The ultra-lowbudget , gritty but lyrical Killer of Sheep, which examines the daily life of a slaughterhouse worker, was filmed in South Central L.A. on weekends with money he saved from his regular job. (Killer of Sheep might easily have inspired Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, which has a similarly jagged and claustrophobic sense of place.) My Brother’s Wedding (1983), financed largely by European TV, played in New Directors/New Films but never received commercial distribution . One of the few films to examine economic and class relations within African American society, it focuses on an inner-city man whose brother moves up in the world by marrying into a rich family. To Sleep with Anger (1990), Burnett’s most powerful and accomplished film, was produced by Ed Pressman after it had been turned down by PBS and other public funders. With a great ensemble cast led by Danny Glover , a contrapuntal, Chekhovian screenplay, and a mise-en-scène that blends slice-of-life with magical realism, To Sleep with Anger weaves the points of view of three generations of an extended African American family with roots in both the rural South and urban California. The amy taubin / 1995 101 film won considerable critical attention but was ineptly distributed by Samuel Goldwyn and never reached the audience it deserved. Still, it attracted the attention of CiBy 2000, the French production company with a penchant for serious art film directors. CiBy 2000 financed Burnett ’s most recent film, The Glass Shield, an introspective policier that has been making the festival circuit and probably will be released by Miramax, although no one is sure exactly when. Miramax originally scheduled an October 1994 opening, but now they’re saying sometime in the spring of 1995. No less a hybrid than To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield is about a naïve black rookie cop who desperately wants to win the approval of his undisguisedly racist fellow officers in the LAPD. Only when he becomes complicit in framing a murder suspect (Ice Cube in yet another memorable performance), and is forced to confront the corruption around him, does he begin to come to terms with his own identity . The Glass Shield opens with a title sequence that telescopes the entire narrative into a series of comic-book-styled drawings. The garish color and pulp quality of comic-book imagery carries over into the film proper, where it’s offset by the intensely subjective point of view of the narrative. The mix of genres throws the viewer off balance and challenges the conventional expectation that films dealing with race will be couched in documentary-style realism. On January 7 and 8, the American Museum of the Moving Image will present “Inner-City Blues: The Films of Charles Burnett.” In addition to the three earlier features, Burnett hopes to show at least a few scenes from The Glass Shield in the context of a discussion of his work moderated by Voice critic Greg Tate. When asked why The Glass Shield still has no release date, Burnett, who is among the most tactful and reserved of filmmakers (one can’t imagine a conversation between him and the Weinsteins), acknowledged that he and Miramax had had some differences about the film but that he hoped they were close to resolving them. According to the festival rumor mill, Miramax wanted a more conventional conclusion, with the bad cops punished and the good cop rewarded. When I saw The Glass Shield at the Vancouver Film Festival, the audience clearly was put off by the last scene, not because it’s narratively false, but because the acting was unconvincing. What I hoped was that Miramax would finance...