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Shadows of Watts, in the Light
- University Press of Mississippi
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141 Shadow of Watts, in the Light Dave Kehr/2007 From the New York Times, March 25, 2007. © 2007 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. With the click of a mouse, Kathy Thomson brings a face out of the darkness—the face of a young African American woman, looking with sadness and concern out of a small screened window in a white frame house. The face belongs to the actress Kaycee Moore, a star of Charles Burnett’s 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep, and it has been hidden in shadows for almost thirty years. Burnett, who directed, wrote, produced, edited, and shot Killer of Sheep, hasn’t seen Moore’s face in quite this way since he first photographed it. Back then, he was a student filmmaker shooting on the run with no money to spend on equipment and even less time to set it up, and he wasn’t able to light Moore so that she would stand out against the dim interior. But now that Killer of Sheep itself is coming out of the shadows, there is a little bit of time and money to go back and make the fixes that were impossible three decades ago. Thomson is a colorist for Modern Videofilm, the company here that is transferring Killer of Sheep to video for its first DVD release, one of many steps in the complicated process of resurrecting a film many consider a lost masterpiece. It is Thomson’s job to go through a film, frame by frame, and make the adjustments in color and contrast that make an image pop on the screen. Looking over her shoulder Burnett was impressed by her magic. “That’s nice,” he said softly, as one by one the images of Killer of Sheep took on a density and detail that had been dormant for years. 142 charles burnett: inter views Burnett, then a thirty-three-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, made Killer of Sheep as his thesis film. Working on weekends when he could gather his largely nonprofessional cast together, he used equipment checked out of the university—“Easy access to those cameras and editing machines was the reason I put off graduating as long as I could,” he said—and much of the black-andwhite film stock was salvaged from production houses, which would often give the young student filmmakers their “short ends,” partially used reels of negative that still contained a few minutes of shooting time. Burnett never dreamed that his film would get a commercial release. But today Killer of Sheep is widely acknowledged as one of the most insightful and authentic dramas about African American life on film, as well as one of the earliest examples of the politically aware black independent cinema that was taking shape in the 1970s. And in the years since, even as it has become almost impossible to see, Killer of Sheep has gathered a reputation as one of the finest American films, period. In 1988 Burnett received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant on the basis of Killer of Sheep and made his second feature , My Brother’s Wedding; in 1990 Killer of Sheep was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Where has Killer of Sheep been? “It was never meant to be shown in public,” Burnett said, explaining why he had never obtained permission to use the musical passages—marvelously apposite choices of blues, pop, and jazz—that accompany and accentuate his images. Even though the fragile 16-millimeter film itself had been restored and transferred to 35 millimeters by the UCLA film preservationist Ross Lipman in 2000, no distributor was willing to take on a title with such conspicuous legal problems. The cost of tracking down the owners of the music rights and compensating them seemed to far outweigh any potential profit. Enter Dennis Doros, who, with his wife, Amy Heller, runs Milestone Film & Video, a boutique distributor with an unconventional catalogue—silent films, travel documentaries, philosophical Asian dramas —that reflects the taste of its founders. Doros heard about the restoration from his friend Lipman, and after meeting with Burnett, decided to take the plunge. “We thought it would take about six months to get the music clearances ,” Doros said. “That was six years ago.” [35.169.107...