Charles Burnett: Interviews

An Artisan of Daily Life: Charles Burnett

5 An Artisan of Daily Life: Charles Burnett Catherine Arnaud and Yann Lardau/1981 Published in La Revue du cinéma, July–August 1981, 92–94. Reprinted by permission. Born in the South of the United States (and profoundly marked by it), Charles Burnett grew up in Watts, the Los Angeles ghetto, which about ten years ago experienced violent disturbances, and he lives there still. A cameraman by training, he has directed Several Friends (1969), Killer of Sheep (1977), and a short, The Horse (1973), a prize winner at Oberhausen . He has also worked as cinematographer on many independent movies, such as Your Children Come Back to You by Alile Sharon Larkin, Bless Their Little Hearts by Billy Woodberry, and others. Question: Your original training is in electronics. How and why did you choose the cinema? Charles Burnett: I’ve always been interested in photography, even though I was never lucky enough to own a camera when I was a child. That was the first thing that attracted me to the movies. I was working in Los Angeles, but I had a lot of free time and I spent my free hours going to the movies, to kill time! Gradually, I got caught up in it and I thought maybe I could work in this field. So I looked for a school and enrolled at UCLA, to learn film technique. There I discovered that what interested me wasn’t only camera work, but also telling stories. So I changed sections to study film direction. I also took courses in screenwriting (“creative writing”), and I combined the two elements, writing and direction, which, for me, represented the most creative part of film work. As a matter of fact, before entering UCLA, I was very illiterate about the cinema. I didn’t know film history well at all, and I only gradually became interested in the work of directors and cinematographers and learned to recognize it. I was also impressed by old movies, especially 6 charles burnett: inter views the French films of Vigo, Renoir, and Bresson, and the old Hollywood movies as well. At UCLA I had the great luck to take a course of Basil Wright’s. When I enrolled in his course, I didn’t know his name or his work (Song of Ceylon ). He made me understand that the cinema was something serious, capable of expressing the nature and the dignity of man. He also made me understand the value of the documentary, the importance of not imposing your own values on the topics you film, particularly when you come from a different world. He brought a certain humanism to my way of seeing things. Afterwards I looked at film in a different way, not only as entertainment , but as something that could become a part of change, something that could express my reality. Thanks to him, I have a lot of respect for the documentary, which sometimes goes farther than the fiction film, at least in spontaneity and the expression of a certain truth of the topic being filmed. Q: You make your movies primarily for an African American audience. What ethical and aesthetic responsibilities follow from this choice? CB: I live in the community in which, and about which, I make my movies. I look at the movies in a very different way, more concerned with the real feelings of people. I’ve worked on (and seen) many movies about the working class that showed the exploitation, then the consciousness raising, the organization through unions, the victory, and so forth. But in reality, it doesn’t happen like that. The people I know are out of work; the kind of movie where all the problems get solved can’t be of any interest to them. Life is not an object lesson of the type A + B = C . . . After I’d seen a number of these movies, made by socially involved people who didn’t have any real experience of the working class, I realized that their conception of the social movie came from their perception of the milieu that they were familiar with—the middle class. However, the people that I knew were out of work, they didn’t have union experience, or a political consciousness, or time to become politicized . This type of film, where problems were solved for the spectator, couldn’t have any relevance for them. I tried to work in another way, to look at my community in a way that allowed...