Documenting African- American culture in Los Angeles' Watts district, the long-heralded 1977 film finally makes its way to a larger audience, restored and enlarged, after 30 years of copyright wrangling.
Charles Burnett’s "Killer of Sheep" is one of American cinema’s great lost treasures. Originally submitted as his UCLA thesis project in 1977, the film was then immediately set adrift in high art purgatory thanks to unresolved music copyright issues that made a wide theatrical or home video release impossible. It has since graced several noteworthy all-time top movies lists and been honored by the Library of Congress with national treasure status, all of which have generated an unprecedented amount of buzz and at last prompted the college to restore and release this unsung independent classic to the public.
Viewers anticipating a quick and quirky contemporary “indie” flick, however, will face disappointment in "Killer of Sheep"’s unhurried pace, which, born of restraint and patience, advocates comprehension of an old, nearly forgotten filmmaking tenet: that extraneous dialogue is not always necessary to convey one’s point. In fact, endless exposition often works contrariwise to thematic worth, dismantling subtext with the surgical precision of a blunt edged chainsaw.
Burnett instead emphasizes the medium’s many intrinsic strengths, balancing the temporality of sound, cleverness of the written word and energetic flash of light as image in the camera’s eye without neglecting the story of Stan, a slaughterhouse worker struggling to stabilize his family against urban and economic decay while somehow preserving his dreamer’s spirit.
It’s an equilibrium that develops theme and plot even when its characters refuse to speak. Mid 20th century black music often accentuates the stillness of these sparsely dialogued scenes, lending a wistful silent era aesthetic to Burnett’s poignant moments of human longing. When dialogue finally assumes the lead, it dips freely between gentle, poetic murmuring and the indecipherable babble of everyday conversation, each of which provide a rich metaphoric backdrop for the events caught on evocative 16mm black and white.
But it’s a bit misleading to call "Killer of Sheep"’s sequential occurrences a full-fledged plot; it rarely indulges in storytelling impositions or contrivances, adopting the unwavering Italian neorealist drone of working class life that is offset only by Burnett’s weighty symbolic flourishes. For example, dogs bark ceaselessly beyond the supposed safety of Stan’s front door like the steady, patient knock of an oppressive world waiting to collect another soul. His brutal work on the slaughterhouse floor provides an even more distressing analogy between the panicked sheep rushing to their deaths and Stan’s neighbors, who drift from one menial task to another across the bleak urban landscape. Images of children playing violently are often intercut with those displaying eviscerated sheep carcasses, an irony which intensifies as Stan, the would-be romantic hero broken by a cyclical system he is inescapably a part of, hits the sheep, screams at them, herds them down that fatal ramp, incapable of seeing that it runs parallel to the scorched streets on which his children play.
By now "Killer of Sheep" must seem a coldhearted portrayal of mankind’s unsalvageable social construct, but the aforementioned gloom belies its subtle yet intoxicating hopefulness. Burnett doesn’t soften the harsh realities of modern living, but he encourages us to find relief in smaller things, like the sound of a child’s laugh or a hot cup of tea pressing against Stan’s cheek, stirring up memories of sexual intimacy’s aching warmth. Each of these upbeat turns reveals another scrap of decency floating amidst humanity’s malicious flotsam, and even society’s tendency to deride such optimism (in Stan’s case, a close friend scoffing at his teatime revelation) cannot come close to sinking it.
Scott Miller was born in the distant, magical land of Phoenix, AZ, but has since migrated across the vast Sonoran to Tucson, an odd desert village in which hippies and snowbirds do battle in the sun-scorched streets. He spends his days making and admiring various forms of art as well as writing media criticism and fiction while avoiding bright lights that might aggravate his vampirism.
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