Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:47 am 
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Location: California/NYC
A slice of Watts preserved forever

Killer of Sheep is a peculiar and unique film about ordinary and very real Watts black people. A man, his wife, his little kids and some people he knows are shown in little scenes organized by a variety of classic black songs and separated by sequences of neighborhood kids playing in yards and sidewalks and vacant lots -- fighting with stones, dirt, and sand; riding bikes; girls chanting jumping rope songs; boys getting hurt and crying; and, memorably, boys and girls seen from below as they jump daringly from one building over to another. Now revived in some art houses, Killer of Sheep is a rough but powerful statement.

We begin with the strong visuals. The square black and white images of Killer of Sheep show a simple and powerful sense of visual composition. Husband and wife sitting at the table are as unified in the weight and rhythms of planes as a painting by Cézanne. This hasn't got much in it to appeal to an ordinary audience, but it's still a film that feels definitive as a late Seventies statement about the black urban American poor. In its desultory way of capturing true blackness it's not hard to be reminded David Gordon Green's George Washington, and Green has cited this film as an influence. But beyond that, the muscular clarity and precise sense of composition define Burnett as the ultimate vernacular Cartier Bresson of the southern California ghetto.

Next we move to the people. Stan (Henry Gale Sanders) works in a sheep slaughterhouse. His pretty wife--and we see this more than once--dolls herself up to please him and have sex with him after dinner, but when he gets home from work he's too tired and demoralized even to talk. On a day off Stan goes with a friend to buy an old car engine for $15 from a card-playing man in flashy clothes whose nephew is on the floor recovering from a fight. Later Stan and his wife and friends get dolled up and go off in a car to the race track but they get a flat and there's no spare so there's no trip to the race track either. In a memorable scene Stan and his wife slow danceto Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" in their house. Just the way Stan looks at his wife and puts his hand on her says more than hundreds of other movies about a life lived together in intimacy but without hope. A couple men steal a TV, daring anybody to stop them. Scenes of Stan working in the slaughterhouse fill in the deadening side of his work life. Their numbing brutality is the only thing that is redundant in a film in which otherwise nothing seems wasted.

Not all the elements in Killer of Sheep are as strong; it's just that no one else filmed this material so directly and forcefully. Burnett's dialogue isn't great and his actors are amateurish and the scenes don't go anywhere--the story line is episodic and a little bit aimless--though assuredly that is an essential part of the point in this depiction of a life without prospects. Though the roughness does part to explain Burnett's obscurity, polish isn't always the thing that most matters. Despite the fact that this was a graduate piece made in UCLA film school for under ten thousand dollars, it is--it's clear now in a theatrical revival thirty years later--a film that's extraordinarily, inexplicably memorable for its images and its people and the powerful songs that bind them together.

Though unevenly, Burnett went on after this first feature to maintain quality, but never gained much of an audience. His editing style, his abrupt, casual sense of the flow of things, didn't change a great deal in his later movies with more trained actors and a more reasonable budget: To Sleep with Anger (1990) starring Danny Glover, which got some video play and festival attention. His 1994 police drama, The Glass Shield, which was notable, well reviewed, but again little seen. I came into the IFC Center in NYC to see Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche on a rainy Monday night and Vanessa Redgrave and a small entourage swept in behind me to see Burnett's film. I knew its reputation was high but wondered why Ms. Redgrave had chosen it for her night off from the theater where I'd just sat front row center to see her in Joan Didion's one-person Year of Magical Thinking. The answer was: her sister Lynn Redgrave acted in a Burnett film of 1999 that was never distributed. This was The Annihilation of Fish with James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder. Unfortunately one writer who's seen it reports it's his worst film, a clumsy attempt to do something more mainstream. It is somewhat saddening to learn that his latest effort is a bust. It's also a little difficult to avoid feeling cynical about the way magazine and newspaper writers about the movies so consistently nowadays fall all over each other to praise work that's three decades old, but have little good to say about anything offbeat produced last month. What could be safer? But it seems at heart Charles Burnett has always remained as much a maverick he was in '77. Burnett has received awards, a number of them in 1999. The recent art house revival of Killer of Sheep by Milestone Films may bring him some further recognition.

Rotten Tomatoes has details of the Killer of Sheep revival locations and links to further information on current screenings of this now much-heralded film.

http://www.killerofsheep.com/

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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