Charles Burnett: Interviews

This Bitter Earth

150 This Bitter Earth James Ponsoldt/2007 Published in Filmmaker, Spring 2007. Reprinted by permission. “When I stumbled across a 16mm print of Killer of Sheep at film school in North Carolina, it was like finding gold. I had never seen an American film quite like it . . . raw, honest simplicity that left me sitting there in an excited silence. It echoed throughout George Washington, the first film that David Gordon Green and I made together.” —Tim Orr, cinematographer (All the Real Girls, Raising Victor Vargas) What sort of anxiety exists in the influence of a visionary masterpiece that is virtually unknown by a majority of the mainstream audience? According to music apocrypha, Brian Eno said, “Only about a thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a rock ’n’ roll band.” Now consider Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, shot for less than ten thousand dollars in the Watts community of southern Los Angeles during the seventies and considered a seminal film in the canon of independent cinema. Have you seen it? If the answer is no, there’s a good reason. While radically divergent in content, Killer of Sheep is a kindred spirit to Todd Haynes’s first film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and Cocksucker Blues (photographer Robert Frank’s anarchic, drug-fueled 1972 Rolling Stones tour documentary) in that it’s been legally prevented for decades from having a commercial release. But unlike those two mythically “unseen” films, Killer of Sheep has finally overcome its legal hurdles—a stellar soundtrack by luminaries like Paul Robeson, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Scott Joplin, and Earth, Wind & james ponsoldt / 2007 151 Fire, among others, was largely uncleared—and is now, on its thirtieth anniversary, in theatrical release from Milestone Films with a restored 35mm print by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s thesis film for UCLA, which he wrote, directed, shot, edited, and produced, won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival and Sundance (then called the U.S. Film Festival) in the early eighties, was labeled one of the “100 Essential Films” by the National Society of Film Critics in 2002 and declared a “national treasure” by the Library of Congress. Often referred to as an American Bicycle Thief, Burnett’s film may have more in common with the stories of James Joyce, who was famously obsessed with allowing his characters to experience “epiphanies,” which the author defined in Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” In the opening scene of Killer of Sheep, a man lectures his son for not defending his brother in a fight. The father, only inches from the boy’s face, says, “You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man.” The boy’s mother, busy consoling the beaten-up and crying brother, his head in her lap, walks across the room with a serene expression on her face and, without saying a word, smacks her son across the cheek. The boy takes it like a man. Like a man. This notion is at the core of Killer of Sheep: what it means to be an adult, and how children learn and internalize grown-up behavior and responsibilities through lectures, through tears, but mostly by silently observing, peeking around corners, usually unbeknownst to their parents . The children of Killer of Sheep are witnesses, sponges—loved and shielded, but not ignorant. What do these children see? Men like Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders)—a husband, father, and worker in a slaughterhouse, where he hustles sheep to the killing floor, then cleans up the resulting mess. Stan arrives home exhausted, stressed, and unable to please his wife (Kaycee Moore). When he buys a car for “fifteen dollars—and a shirt for collateral” with his friend Eugene (Eugene Cherry), believing that a new ride will prove his worth as a man and a provider, the extended vérité scene that follows, involving a steep hill, an open pickup truck, and poor planning, ends hilariously. Yet the 152 charles burnett: inter views expression on Stan’s face as the motor—and with it his mechanized dreams—crashes to the concrete is one of unspeakable devastation. Still, every morning, Stan goes to work. While people in the neighborhood steal television sets and disrespect their elders...