By J. Robert Parks
“You ain’t a child anymore. You about to be a god-damned man. It’s about time you start learning what life is about.” -- from the opening scene of Killer of Sheep
I know of few films that reveal more of what “life is about” than Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Unfortunately, it is better known for how it was made and not released than for its incredible portrait of lower-class America. So let me get that stuff out of the way. Burnett shot what would become his student film at UCLA on a budget of $10,000 by using non-professional actors and shooting in black-and-white 16mm on weekends in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood in 1972-73. Though the film won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1981 and was placed on the National Film Registry in 1990, it went unreleased because of issues regarding music rights. I was fortunate enough to see it a couple times in academic settings, but most people, even rabid cinephiles, could only hear of its greatness. Not until the good folks at Milestone Films, assisted by generous help from Steven Soderbergh, untangled those rights (and paid the appropriate people) was Killer of Sheep able to be released last year and is now finally out on dvd.
Careful readers can probably guess the movie is about poor black folk--‘Watts’ has its own connotations--but that description is far too narrow. Yes, it focuses on Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders), an African-American man who works in a slaughterhouse and is so beaten down by his job and his environment that he seems to sleep-walk through many days. Yet, the film doesn’t reduce Stan to his job or his socio-economic class. Instead, Killer of Sheep offers a portrait of him and his family and his neighborhood that, without flinching or stooping to condescension, affirms his humanity while recognizing the difficult obstacles he faces.
Burnett accomplishes this by establishing a striking sense of place. I grew up in a housing project in the ‘70s, and the film feels like how I grew up. The way kids played in the alleys, how fights would sometimes spill out of the house and onto the street, how you bonded with neighbors over financial difficulties but yet everyone knew he was on his own.
Yet the movie is also fundamentally universal. The movie’s first action scene involves a game of ‘war’ played by boys in an open lot with plywood boards and dirt rocks, and I was taken back to my own childhood “battles” with friends. This and many other scenes feature children, and Burnett finds both the universal timelessness of childhood themes (boys playing until someone gets hurt, daughters cuddling up to their fathers, sons both admiring and fearing those same fathers) and wonderfully specific details. I have a particular fondness for a scene in which Stan’s daughter (played by Burnett’s real-life niece) sings along to an old record. Burnett gets his camera low enough to the ground so we can watch what feels so natural.
Those lyrical moments are often paired with scenes that portray the difficulty of being part of the working poor. We see Stan at work, moving the sheep along and cleaning up the offal. We see him trying to cut a deal that could make a small difference in his life. We see his wife shooing along some thugs who have a proposition for her husband. And we see Stan trying to rise above all this and find intimacy with his wife and children, but boy that can be hard when you’re tired.
The movie, despite its overall tone, is also incredibly funny. A Sisyphean struggle with a car engine ends with a hilarious sight gag. Another sight gag involves a windshield that doesn’t exist. A boy tries to stand on his head while a friend can’t seem to count time. Another boy puts sugar on his cereal and then some more and then some more and then some more. By the time the scene ends, the audience is howling. The humor comes from that amazing recognition Burnett achieves--we see ourselves as we once were and as we are, and we laugh at our own foibles.
But that humor can sometimes turn on a dime. In one incredible moment, what had been a funny confrontation between a wife and her no-good husband changes when Burnett cuts to a close-up of her face as she looks back at the crying children on her couch. His command of film style is genuinely impressive. Using the naturalistic approach of Jean Renoir or the Italian neo-realists, Burnett takes advantage of his grainy film stock and creates moments where we feel like we’re standing in the corner. He uses long shots to show us how people react to each other and long takes to let us immerse ourselves in the moment. He chooses low camera angles that confer a dignity to his subjects, who move beyond standard portrayals of the poor (merely subjects of the director’s lens) and become admirable, if not heroic.
And then there’s Burnett’s use of music, the bugaboo that kept his masterpiece out of the public eye for 30 years. But watching it now, we can see why he held fast to his convictions, why he knew that the movie has to have Paul Robeson singing “What is America?,” why it needs Earth, Wind & Fire and Elmore James. And especially why it has to include Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth.” That song provides the soundtrack to one of the loveliest and most heart-breaking dances I’ll ever see. You should see it, too.
My friend Rob Davis and I podcasted about Killer of Sheep recently. You can check that out here or by searching at iTunes for the Errata Movie Podcast. Please excuse the shameless plug.
