In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

138 Independent Lens: Charles Burnett Scott Foundas/2006 Published in LA Weekly, April 20, 2006. Copyright © 2006 by LA Weekly. Reprinted with permission of Village Voice Media. Charles Burnett’s first feature film, Killer of Sheep (1977), remains to this day a near-mythic object, one of the first fifty films inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, yet rarely screened and never issued on video owing to unresolved copyright issues. Meanwhile , Burnett’s second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), has suffered such a clandestine existence as to make Killer of Sheep seem like Titanic by comparison—when I spoke with Burnett during the course of writing this story, he told me that even he doesn’t have a copy of it. And Burnett’s work of the subsequent two decades has proved scarcely more available. Simply put, there may be no better contemporary American filmmaker whose films are more difficult to come by—or who has more richly evoked the infinite varieties and textures of life, black or otherwise , in our city. He wasn’t born here—who was?—but Burnett moved to Los Angeles from his native Mississippi as a child and took an engineering degree from LACC before, in the early 1970s, making his way to the film program at UCLA. There, in the company of classmates Billy Woodberry (Bless Their Little Hearts) and Haile Gerima (Bush Mama), he emerged as one of the leading lights in a movement of young African American filmmakers keen to show their people, and the city they inhabited, in ways rarely glimpsed in mainstream movies. Reflecting on their work in his 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen singled out Burnett as the herald of a “Los Angeles neo-realism” that ran in blinding contrast to cinematic depictions of L.A. as an oasis of beachside cottages, hilltop palaces and the upwardly mobile upper middle scott foundas / 2006 139 class—a city that ceased to exist south of the 10 freeway or east of the 110. So the geography mapped by Killer of Sheep wasn’t merely physical, but sociological—a South Central inhabited not just by pimps, hookers , and OGs, but by poverty-line families eking out meager existences while hoping against hope for change to come. Told as a series of episodes from the life of a Watts slaughterhouse worker struggling to hold his family together, even as his identification with the beasts he slays begins to weigh heavy on him, the film juxtaposes impressionistic fragments from the lives of the working poor against Paul Robeson singing “What Is America to Me?” And yet, what makes Killer of Sheep so unforgettable , so Renoir-like in its humanism, are the scatterings of joy Burnett finds amid the gray gloom: fleeting moments—a junk-strewn lot transformed into a playground by the power of a child’s imagination, a husband and wife holding each other in a long-forgotten embrace— that are like mirages in a desert. To see that film again today—on those rare occasions when one can see it—is to be reminded of just how much American movies in general , and African American movies in particular, have suffered for not having Burnett as a regular voice at the table. (Instead, we get wellheeled minstrel shows like Crash and Hustle & Flow.) Indeed, in the years following Killer, Burnett’s own life ran nearly as lean as those of the characters he depicted. My Brother’s Wedding, which told of a Watts dry cleaner marooned somewhere between the professional aspirations of his family and the thug lives of his friends, was plagued by production problems (including the quitting of the lead actor—twice) and never properly released. And by the time of a 1997 New York Times profile tellingly headlined “A Director Who Collects Honors, Not Millions ,” Burnett was candid about the fact that were it not for the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” he received in 1988, he might have had to abandon his filmmaking career altogether. Luckily he didn’t, and the result was To Sleep with Anger (1990), one of the great movies of the nineties and a magnificent dark comedy about how the arrival of a meddlesome stranger (brilliantly played by Danny Glover) sparks a collision of tradition and modernity, religion and superstition, for an extended middle-class family. Another story of Watts, it is a soulful evocation of a place spilling over with black history and folklore, where backyards teem...

Share