Shot for less than $10,000 over a series of weekends in 1977, Killer Of Sheep was initially submitted by writer-director Charles Burnett as a thesis requirement for his UCLA Master’s degree.
Thanks to convoluted legal wrangles over the transcendent soundtrack – featuring Dinah Washington, Rachmaninov, Paul Robeson, Etta James, Gershwin, Big Boy Crudup and Earth, Wind & Fire – the film has rarely been seen since except on scratchy 16mm prints in galleries and on campuses. This has done little to halt its sphere of influence, particularly among young Gen-X neo-realists. It is difficult to imagine how a film like David Gordon Green’s George Washington might look without Burnett’s influence. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how such a film could exist at all.
Across the Atlantic, our American chums have long acknowledged Burnett’s masterpiece. In 1990, the Library of Congress declared it a national treasure; it was among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance. In 2002, the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the 100 Essential Films of all time.
Now thanks to the dedicated folks at Milestone Films, we can finally take in Killer Of Sheep on a splendid new 35mm print. Can it possibly live up to its reputation? Most certainly.
Set in Burnett’s home borough of Watts, it is a remarkable social document of the African-American plight. It is difficult to recognise these environs as south Los Angeles. Forget the relatively glossy poverty tours like Boyz N The Hood. Even by ghetto standards, the place looks bombed out and third world. It is exactly as Thomas Pynchon described it a decade earlier, somewhere “the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, (are) all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.”
Our hero, Stan (Henry G. Sanders), is a troubled, haunted young man capable of finding courtly, erotic dreams in a coffee cup. When he isn’t mending things around his shabby home, he works in an abattoir where the monotony and cruelty of killing has left him unable to sleep and detached from his heartstoppingly beautiful wife and children. As he himself puts it; “I’m just working myself into my own hell.”
It is typical of Burnett’s strange existential poetry that the film pivots around a butcher’s realisation that he is just as helpless as the unfortunate animals he dispatches. The director finds a beauty and vibrancy in the brutality of his world; here children in tartan flares throw rocks at passing freight trains, lost in some unending game where the rules are only known onto them.
Odd camera angles and occasionally eccentric images work to reinforce Killer Of Sheep’s discombobulating message; we’re all in the slaughterhouse but some of us are staring past the bars.