Charles Burnett: Interviews

Introduction

ix Introduction Charles Burnett is a groundbreaking African American filmmaker and one of this country’s greatest directors, yet he remains largely unknown . His films, most notably Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), are considered classics, yet few filmgoers have seen them or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the making of a rare film master whose work brings to the screen the texture and poetry of life in the black community. As a supremely talented and fiercely independent film director, Burnett makes movies according to his own unique artistic vision and socially engaged viewpoint. His films’ best qualities—rich characterizations , morally and emotionally complex narratives, and intricately observed tales of African American life “subtly layered with cultural references and mythic overtones”—are precisely what make his films such a “tough sell” in the mass marketplace (see Nelson Kim’s profile of Burnett in Senses of Cinema, 2003; not included in this volume). Hollywood , as the interviews presented here reveal, has been largely inept in responding to the challenges of marketing Burnett’s films. And no one is more aware of it than Burnett, who told Terrence Rafferty in 2001, “It just takes an extraordinary effort to keep going when everybody’s saying to you, ‘No one wants to see that kind of movie,’ or ‘There’s no black audience.’” Against the odds, Burnett did keep going. This book provides a window into three decades of his directorial career, during which he produced an extraordinary body of work. It focuses on his status as a true independent filmmaker and explores his motivation for involving himself in films that all chronicle some aspect of the black experience in America. As a film student in UCLA’s Graduate Program in Film and Television Production during the 1970s, Burnett, along with fellow students like x introduction Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodberry, set out to tell stories that rejected Hollywood stereotypes that depicted the black community in strictly negative terms—drug infested, violent, malevolent, and dysfunctional. Eventually this group of young filmmakers would come to be known as alternatively the “L.A. School of Black Filmmakers” and the “L.A. Rebellion.” Burnett’s student films included two shorts, Several Friends (1969) and The Horse (1973), and his feature-length MFA thesis film, Killer of Sheep (1977), an unusually complex and poetic vision of African American life set in the Watts section of Los Angeles. As Burnett saw it, these three films (and the rest that would follow) “offered insights ” to black viewers about their own experiences growing up black in America. His films were in sharp contrast to the “action-packed dramas ” produced by Hollywood that, according to Burnett, had reduced the black community to “drugs and mothers who prostitute themselves . . . I can sell a plot to a studio, I believe, about situations where a girl is on drugs, her brother is on drugs, their mother is on drugs, and their father disappeared and there is this white guy who is going to come and save the young boy or something like that” (American Film, 1991). “When I was in UCLA,” recalls Burnett, “we were making independent films because we wanted to do something positive. Not necessarily to entertain” (Boston Globe, May 28, 1995; not included in this collection ). “It was a period [the late 1960s and 1970s] when there was a lot of social activism [and] people were really using arts as a means to social change. Film was there, and I gravitated towards it” (Sight and Sound, 2008). Burnett’s first feature film, Killer of Sheep (1977), made the rounds at a number of European film festivals during the late seventies and early eighties, and went on to win the prestigious Critics Award at the 1981 Berlin Festival. Yet, as he reflected on this early phase of his career in an interview (Ponsoldt, 2007), Burnett recalled: “When Killer of Sheep won the Critics Award at the Berlin Film Festival it was in all the European newspapers but when I came back to the U.S., there was no press.” In fact, by the early 1980s, Burnett’s work had begun to capture a glimmer of critical attention, principally in European film publications . This book opens with two interviews from that period published in France (McMullin, 1980; Arnaud and Lardau, 1981; see also “Black Independents: Interview with Charles Burnett” in Skrien, a film magazine from the Netherlands...