Charles Burnett: Interviews

Blues People

181 Blues People James Bell /2008 Published in Sight & Sound, July 2008. Reprinted by permission of the British Film Institute. Writing in Sight & Sound in 2002, the American critic Armond White called Charles Burnett’s 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep “the leastknown great modern movie from the United States.” But over the past year awareness of the film has grown, at least in the U.S., where its rerelease last year had critics rushing to acclaim it as a rediscovered masterpiece—something White greeted with suspicion. “Words like ‘masterpiece’ fall too easily upon the thorny history of Burnett’s debut ,” he has written, arguing that it is too tidily convenient to slot the film retrospectively into the canon, leaving its champions feeling safe and satisfied. Burnett’s debut remains one of the most startling films in American cinema precisely because of the challenges it presents. More a series of poetic vignettes than conventional narrative, the film centers on a working-class black man named Stan who works in a slaughterhouse to support his wife and two children. Made as his thesis film while he was a student at UCLA, Killer of Sheep was shot over a year at weekends with non-professional actors from his home district of Watts. It portrays an economically deprived black community that simply hadn’t been seen on screen before—and rarely since. The challenges of Killer of Sheep also come from its subtly original form, which owes an obvious cinematic debt to Italian neorealism and documentary, but with an inspired improvisatory feel that’s unique in cinema—something closer to the feel of blues or jazz. L.A. Rebellion After abandoning early ambitions to become a stills photographer, Bur- 182 charles burnett: inter views nett enrolled at UCLA’s celebrated film course in the late 1960s, partly to avoid the draft, but also through a need to do “something.” “It was a period when there was a lot of social activism,” he recalls. “People were really using arts as a means to social change. Film was there, and I gravitated towards it.” At UCLA Burnett formed friendships with like-minded black filmmakers such as Julie Dash and Haile Gerima, a group sometimes referred to as the “L.A. Rebellion” for the political and socially aware films they sought to make. “I just didn’t identify with the films the majority of students at UCLA were making, which were coming out of the flower-child, hippy movement,” says Burnett. “I was more interested in films about what I saw as the real issues. The other stuff was a luxury.” Instead, he took inspiration from the Italian neorealists, Jean Renoir, and the British documentary movement. But although he had got into filmmaking to make socially aware films, Burnett saw a dishonesty in many of the more dogmatic films of the time. “At UCLA there was a small group of people who were making political films,” he recalls, “but they were romanticizing poverty and creating scenarios that just didn’t apply to reality. Making a film about the black community, you had to be very aware of who you are. I wanted it to feel like I’d just taken a camera into the community and recorded what happened.” It’s this sense of an honest capturing of small incidents that makes Killer of Sheep so rich. Although every shot is carefully composed, the film has a documentary immediacy that feels spontaneous. There’s also an indefinable poetry to many of the film’s images, which display flashes of humor and beauty, underpinned by a deep sense of melancholy—much like the blues. In one scene Stan’s daughter stands by a wire-mesh fence wearing a dog mask; like so many others in the film, the image is striking, humorous, unforgettable, and yet also somehow unsettling. Such images are made more forceful still by Burnett’s use of music. Rarely have songs and images been combined so resonantly and beautifully as in Killer of Sheep, whose soundtrack boasts Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, and blues singers like Little Walter, Elmore James, Faye Adams , and Dinah Washington. “The music was mainly pieces that my mother used to play,” recalls Burnett. “I had decided on them before filming and they helped me to think of certain images for the film. For example Luis Russell’s ‘Sad Lover Blues’ inspired the scene of Stan and his wife dancing together though in the end I broke the record so [18.191.108...