Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Movie review and director commentary: Killer of Sheep

Charles Burnett makes films about serious subjects. Exclusively.

By John P. Meyer

The soft-spoken Charles Burnett - whose UCLA film project Killer of Sheep (completed for less than $10,000 in 1977) went on to attain semi-legendary word of mouth but has heretofore been seen by relatively few - showed up at the Angelika Dallas Tuesday night (May 30) to host the first North Texas showing of a restored 35mm print of his film.

Killer of Sheep (1977)

Set in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a slaughterhouse worker must suspend his emotions to continue working at a job he finds repugnant, and then he finds he has little sensitivity for the family he works so hard to support.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Killer of Sheep (1977)

In his brief pre-screening remarks, he stated that he made the film (about poor African Americans struggling to make a living in urban Los Angeles) so that viewers would ask themselves the question: "How can these people be helped?"

The film's black and white cinematography is reminiscent of high-grain avant-garde still photography, employing solid immobilized camera sets and uncompromising framing; often people's heads disappear above the top of the frame, lending a disorienting feel to otherwise mundane occurrences or conversations.

Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) centers the action; with a family to support and minimal income, he's overworked and hyper-stressed. In an early scene we see him shirtless on the kitchen floor, attempting to repair the plumbing while a neighbor stands around offering good-spirited verbal abuse; his son and young daughter (the latter wearing a hound-dog face mask) stand by listening in on the conversation and observing the wrench-handling, until the young man starts squeezing his sister's "snout" closed, causing her whining distress. Soon, Stan banishes the two to the out-of-doors, where their play continues.

Leave my dog alone!

It's the play of children presented here that resonates so pervasively with this reviewer; we're looking through a time tunnel on the other side of which kids convene in vacant lots to build forts, toss rocks at passing trains (and each other) and leap from roof to roof as forms of amusement, instead of punching buttons on a game controller or booting up a computer. Given, these kids are disadvantaged, but seeing them good-naturedly roughhousing around and cat-calling each other from their bicycle seats calls to mind an adolescence rife with simpler amusements that seems now more of a mythical past life experience than an actual memory. (Ouch, I've officially descended into Old Fogeyhood.)

On the darker side of the tracks, Stan's job - his sole source of income - involves the processing of lambs at a local meat packing plant, an employment we glimpse episodes of over the course of the narrative; these increasingly-ominous sequences are covered by a soundtrack incorporating music from a variety of genres (jazz, blues), so we are presented with a jarring juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty.

Stan's sexy wife (Kaycee Moore) experiences frustration when her husband comes home from a long day at the slaughterhouse without any interest in romance. She entices him to slow-dance across the living room floor, her hands intimately tracing the curvature of his shirtless, muscular body - but their intimacy is left behind at the door to the bedroom. Stan simply can't work up the necessary spark. Maybe it's depression; maybe it's an uncomfortably acute sense of his own reality. In any case, the thrill is gone.

The primary message of the film may be that this disenfranchised segment of the population exists under the oxygen-depriving bell jar of aimlessness and discontent, with the background knowledge that there's no escape from their situation.

rooftop variety kids' games

HELP ME, SOMEBODY: "Working myself into my own Hell." - Stan, from under the sink.

ANYTHING BUT BLAND: "You about as tasteless as a carrot." - neighbor lady, to her ham-handed, flirtatious nephew.

COMMENTS AND ANECDOTES from director Charles Burnett:

* The film was never intended to be screened theatrically, and thus the rights to the music (including songs by Etta James, Gershwin, Paul Robeson and Earth, Wind & Fire) were never obtained until the restoration of the film was undertaken (by the UCLA Film & Television Archive).

* Burnett states that the film school at UCLA at the time of his attendance was the "anti-Hollywood," and that those more interested in establishment filmmaking gravitated to USC.

* The most brutal review of his film came during its screening at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, noted (according to Charles) for its no-holds-barred critical savagery: some joker in the audience started verbally poking fun at the title even as the opening credits rolled.

* Burnett discovered lead actor Henry Sanders while they shared an elevator - he liked the guy's looks, asked him if he'd done any acting, and found out he'd worked on another student's graduate film project and was eager to try it again. He recruited lead actress Kaycee Moore from a local acting workshop.

* Burnett lists his filmmaking influences as the neo-realists, specifically citing Basil Wright and Jean Renoir. He expressed a lack of interest in making films on anything other than serious subjects; he's currently enamored (from the standpoint of its seriousness) with a film called The Empire in Africa, which documents atrocities carried out during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

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Comments

John Meyer Staff

Dylan, if it's any consolation, you'll be able to see the movie starting tomorrow at the Angelika Dallas.

It was cool meeting Mr. Burnett, though.

1 year, 2 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )