Second act

Charles Burnett, director of Killer of Sheep. (Mongrel Media)

The film Killer of Sheep has been circling the film world like a ghost ship for 30 years. Many scholars regard the 1977 black and white film, set in the low-income neighbourhood of Watts in south-central Los Angeles, as one of the most significant depictions of African-American life ever made. It’s been entered into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and named by the American National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 Essential Films of all time. But until now, Killer of Sheep has been seen by only a lucky few cinephiles (and bootleggers), its release shackled by unresolved music-rights issues.

“I never had the means of distributing it,” says writer-director Charles Burnett, now 63, over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I made it with music without getting clearances because I always thought it would be seen only by a small audience of activists.”

Burnett was a lingering graduate student at UCLA film school in the late 1970s when he finished the Master’s thesis that became Killer of Sheep. A series of stark, poetic vignettes set to a storytelling soundtrack of old blues and jazz, the film doesn’t follow a narrative so much as it depicts the waking dream that is the life of Stan, played with deep refinement and sadness by Henry Gayle Sanders. Stan is the working poor, a father and husband numbed by his job slaughtering sheep in an abattoir. His days are Sisyphean: in one scene, he struggles to locate a working motor for a friend’s perpetually stalled car, only to watch helplessly as the hard-earned hunk of machinery falls out of a truck and smashes en route. On another day, the promise of a fun outing away from the city is thwarted by a flat tire on a country road. And in the film’s seminal scene, Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) slow dance to the Dinah Washington song This Bitter Earth. The woman’s fingernails in his back mark her husband’s impotence, and her own frustrated desires.

In 2000, when it became clear that the film was deteriorating, UCLA film preservationist Ross Lipman transferred Killer of Sheep from 16 millimetre to 35 millimetre, but it took a boutique distribution company called Milestone Film & Video Company to tackle the music clearances.

“We thought the film was incredibly powerful and humane,” says Milestone president Amy Heller, who runs the New Jersey-based company with her husband, Dennis Doros. “In the world, there aren’t many images of working-class people and black people living in their communities that aren’t exaggerated and made into comedy. This is a film about people living their lives the way people do, with pride and dignity.”

Milestone went after the owners of the songs first, and the performers second. “At some point, I thought, this is going to be a lifelong project,” says Heller. “What’s happened is that the music industry has seen the internet basically transform their industry. To a certain extent, they’re shutting the doors on the horses that have gotten out, all that music they can’t control, and concentrating on getting more money for music that no one has asked for yet.”

Clearing the more obscure songs took six years, and $150,000 US, a near-fatal amount for a small company. But Doros and Heller’s lawyer had a contact who knew director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 13, Traffic). After learning of the film’s plight, Soderbergh wrote a cheque for $75,000 US.

“He didn’t want credit, didn’t want a cut, didn’t want his name on it,” says Heller. “He just loves Charles’s work.”

Burnett, soft-spoken and occasionally pausing to quell a stutter, has faced the kinds of obstacles that might make a prolific, independent but Hollywood-friendly director like Soderbergh feel a twinge of recognition, if not exactly guilt: There stands a career, difficult but worthwhile, that could have been mine. 

After Sheep, Burnett made My Brother’s Wedding (1983), about a man watching a sibling ascend the class ladder. Under pressure from his German backers, Burnett sent a rough cut too early, which they released, to his chagrin. The film ostensibly vanished in North America. (Burnett’s own edit will be included with the DVD version of Killer of Sheep this fall.)

After Wedding, Burnett struggled financially, even taking work as a talent agency messenger at one point. Then, in 1988, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for $275,000 US, and set out to make his third film. To Sleep with Anger stars Danny Glover as a southern trickster whose sudden appearance throws a California middle-class family — who are themselves a small diaspora from the south — into turmoil. Earning the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990, Sleep is widely considered the film that delivers on the youthful promise Burnett showed with Sheep. Yet it still made little impact at the box office.

Burnett has always worked — television movies and documentaries, the 1995 Ice Cube feature The Glass Shield, a plethora of shorts — but he hasn’t grown rich in an industry that runs on the illusion that wealth is there for the plucking (when I talk to Heller, Burnett is actually staying at her house in New Jersey while he attends a party for Sheep’s success). Though he did make a television film produced by Oprah Winfrey, for the most part, Burnett has shied away from director-for-hire projects.

“I think it’s something to do with being brought up in and shaped by the whole civil rights movement,” he says. “Art was a forum to change things, a tool for social change. But also, those big Hollywood films, it’s hard to make them work. It takes a talent to deal with those people. They give you the material and they want you to make it work, but they don’t want you to make any changes. Giving away your freedom is very hard.”

Henry Gayle Sanders stars as Stan in Killer of Sheep. (Mongrel Media)

Born in Mississippi and raised around Los Angeles, Burnett ended up at film school in the ’60s and ’70s after doing a community college degree in electrical engineering. There were no timelines to graduate, so most of his peers — including Kids director Larry Clark — hung around as long as possible to use the free equipment.

“Now, film school is a tool to get into Hollywood. When we were in school, UCLA was anti-Hollywood. We were in a vacuum. That can be bad, too, because when you get out, you realize this is a business to some extent,” he says. “But for me, working on film after film as a student helped. I don’t know if a lot of people have that experience. If you come to this business without having secured enough film knowledge and developed your particular vision, you’ll never do it in Hollywood.”

Killer of Sheep arose, according to Burnett, in part as a response to the blaxploitation films popular in the early ’70s, rife with sex-drugs-guns stereotypes of African-Americans. In Burnett’s world of student and art house cinema, a more earnest brand of agitprop filmmaking struck him as equally unsatisfying.

“I made [Sheep] for a progressive audience, all these other student filmmakers, who were making movies prescribing remedies for working-class people. You know: Form a union, organize against management and everything’s OK,” he says. “I wanted to do a film that posed the question: ‘How would you help Stan? How would you help these people?’”

The answer lay in shooting the citizens of Watts in a naturalistic, neo-realist style (though the film was actually carefully scripted), revealing the breadth of their humanity: friends support each other; children are kind as well as cruel; Stan and an old friend share a cup of tea in china cups. Some of the film’s most beautiful images show children playing in empty lots set to Paul Robeson’s booming gospel song The House I Live In (What Is America to Me?), a sparseness imitated by a new generation of filmmakers, including David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls) and Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher). Today, Burnett recalls the no-frills shoot as a buoyant time.

“We were having fun. The whole idea was to demystify filmmaking in the community. We had little kids working the sound,” he says. Burnett shot only on weekends. He recalls an actor and friend telling him he couldn’t make it one day, and would it be possible for Burnett to use somebody else?

“And I’m like, ‘Well we shot you, I don’t think we can use someone else. It’s not like a football team where someone can come in off the sidelines and take your position.’”

When Killer of Sheep was finally released in New York this spring, it created a flurry of critical praise: “An American masterpiece, independent to the bone,” wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. In February, Burnett accompanied the film to the Berlin Film Festival, but mostly, he’s been unable to reflect on Sheep’s sudden new life because he’s been in Namibia, attempting to complete an epic about the liberation of southwest Africa, starring Danny Glover.

“I haven’t really been able to enjoy whatever kind of success [Killer of Sheep] finally got. I was too busy arguing this other thing,” says Burnett. Variety magazine reported that at one point, the crew shut down production over unpaid wages. Making the first film ever produced in Namibia took its toll: Burnett’s blood pressure jumped and he was hospitalized. 

With his health back, and the Namibian film in its final stages, perhaps, 30 years later, Burnett can sit back and savour the long-delayed, victorious arrival of an artifact of his youth.

Burnett pauses, and speaks in his understated voice.

“I just don’t think it’s any better for black filmmakers today. You get comedies and drugs scenes and that’s basically it. Once in a while you get Pursuit of Happyness. The studio controls the content and the form and it’s very hard to get a decent representation of people of colour,” he says. “It’s an ongoing struggle.”

Killer of Sheep opens in Toronto on June 23. The DVD will be released this fall.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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