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Neo-Realism Meets the Blues in Charles Burnett's Killer

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Neo-Realism Meets the Blues in Charles Burnett's Killer NEO-REALISM MEETS THE BLUES IN CHARLES BURNETT’S KILLER OF SHEEP Keith Mehlinger Morgan State University “…the very existence of the blues tradition is irrefutable evidence that those who evol- ved it respond to the vicissitudes of the human condition not with hysterics and desperation, but through the wisdom of poetry informed by pragmatic insight” (Murray, 1996: 208-209). Although little known outside of critics’ circles and dedicated cineastes, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) “remains to this day a near mythic object, one of the first fifty films inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry” (Foundas, Independent Lens: Charles Burnett, in Kapsis (ed.) 2011:138). The film “tenderly recounts a few days in the life of a slaughterhouse worker, Stan (Henry G. Sanders), whose existence is as bounded by invisible threads of hopelessness as that of the sheep that he is forced to kill each day” (Hozic, The House I live In: An Interview with Charles Burnett, in Kapsis, 2011: 75). During its brief theatri- cal release in 1977, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin dismissed Killer of Sheep as “ama- teurish” and ‘boring’. Since then, the film has won awards at festivals and “acquired honorary protection by the National Film Registry accorded to a select few ‘masterpieces’ such as Citi- zen Kane, and aided its author in winning a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship”, popularly known as the “genius award” (Hozic, 2011: 75). In addition to being selected as one of America’s fifty most culturally significant films, the film was named one of the “100 Most Influential Films of All Time” by the National Society of Film and gained critical acclaim in Europe. Burnett told film critic Terrence Rafferty in 2001, “It just takes an extraordi- nary effort to keep going when everybody’s saying to you, ‘ No one wants to see that kind of movie’ or ‘there’s no black audience” (Kapsis, Interviews: Charles Burnett, 2011: ix). The story of this film’s 30-year journey from cult classic to re-release by Milestone Films in theaters and on DVD in 2008 is the story of its music in many ways. To pull together the $150,000 for co- pyright licenses required for the film’s re-release, the director Steve Soderbergh “providentia- lly stepped forward with a gift of $75,000”, that enabled Milestone Films, a small distributor, to save the project” (Kehr, Shadow of Watts, in the Light, in Kapsis, 2011: 143). This article examines core elements of Charles Burnett’s film, Killer of Sheep as a “blues 104 Keith Mehlinger statement” (Murray, 1996: 208-209) with shared aesthetics of neo-realism and the blues in- cluding the visceral power of both modalities, their universal themes of human struggle, and their use of the “objective correlative”, or adequate metaphor in the pursuit of truth and consciousness (Murray, 1996: 2). Burnett merges blues as a diviner of truth with a “state of mind” much like that of the Italian neo-realists, which allowed them to “broaden, first of all, the cinema’s spiritual horizon”, to take moral positions with respect to the social, political, and economic issues facing the nation” (Pacifici, 1962: 241). In the case of Killer of Sheep, Burnett’s focus is the black working class of Watts less than a decade after the 1965 riots when over 30 people lost their lives in violence involving the Los Angeles Police Department, the National Guard, and private citizens. Burnett examines present conditions (circa the seventies) and frames circumstances that could easily call for the necessity of action, but like the Italian filmmakers, Burnett makes truth his advocate through cinematic techniques that appear more documentary than narrative, and are in the spirit of what Visconti called an “anthropomorphic cinema”, portraying people in their lived environment (Gottlieb, 2004: 35). Neo-realism meets the blues in Killer of Sheep (1977) as Burnett brings a blues aesthetic to a style of filmmaking “associated with Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Giuseppe De Santis, among others, working with writers including Cesare Zavattini and Federico Fellini…” (Gottlieb, Rosellini, Open City, and Neorealism, in Gottlieb, 2004: 32). The films deal with the “ravages of fascism” that leave rifts in national identity and that cause the decay of communities. The films show Italians “suffering various forms of material and spiri- tual poverty and oppression that could not be blamed completely on the Black Shirts and the Nazis” (Gottlieb, 2004: 32). Neo-realism also represents resistance by providing a “continuing critique of the conditions, institutions, and individual predilections that cause violence, pover- ty, isolation, and spiritual distress” (Gottlieb, 2004: 32). Of the merged approach that Burnett takes with the blues and neo-realism, it is the blues that is the least understood or valued as a powerful aesthetic envoy that can induce self-reflection, and stir questions of identity with respect to a nation’s past and future, as did neo-realism at the end of World War II. Although there is a body of recorded work from the turn of the 20th century forward, the blues was the province of black artists and storytellers. The art form was marginalized because of cultural hegemony, though the blues were founda- tional to rhythm and blues, and rock music. Burnett, a native of Vicksburg, Mississippi brings his Delta blues values to bear in the film, while coincidentally practicing many of the “Ten Po- ints of Neo-realism”, as described by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in a 1952 film journal that stresses a stripped down cinema vérité emphasizing reality through documentary aesthetics including location production and the use of non-professional actors (Zavattini, Ten Points of Neo-realism,1952: in MacCann, “A Montage of Theories,” 1966). Burnett practices the neorealist aesthetic ever more powerfully because of the blues, for the blues long before the advent of the cinema has been capable of generating cultural self- reflection by embracing humanity (Marsalis, 2008: 61). The blues is music that is older than the European literary movements of the early 20th Century in realism and naturalism that can be traced forward to neo-realism in the cinema (Murray, 1976: 63). As early as 1550, English lexicographers have found records of the phrase “to look blue” meaning “to suffer anxiety, fear, discomfort, and low spirits” (Murray, 1976: 63). The term, “blue devils to designate ba- leful demons has been traced back as 1616”, so it is likely that African-Americans “acquired both the word, and its special connotation” from European Americans (Murray, 1976: 64). Quaderns, 7 (2011), pp. 103-112 Neo-Realism meets the blues in Charles Burnett’s Killer of sheep 105 However blues music has its beginnings in Africa just like the banjo, but was fully evolved in America by slaves expressing their hope, pain, and desires through song that derived from their life experience in a form less choral than spirituals, and not necessarily respectful of the church (Davis, 1995: 36). The blues, like the literary movements from which neo-realism can be traced was concerned with truth and stories of real life. The deep south, especially Mississippi, is where the blues seeped out of swamps and hollers in a character that pilgrims in the 1960s described as “rough, spontaneous, crude and unfinished”, dominated by “stark, unrelieved emotion”, an intense distillation of the music of slavery, “only a step from the wordless field cries and hollers of an older generation” (Hamilton, 2008: 3-4). Killer of Sheep, produced in 16mm black and white film, in some respects seems an ar- tifact. With its primitive look and feel (adding to its sophistication), unconventional plotting, sparse dialogue, and use of episodic vignettes integrating a soundtrack that is dominantly blues based, I liken the experience of watching this film to that of listening to a vinyl LP with all the pops and scratches in the right places. It is this kind of raw experience that helps to authenticate the pain, the joy, and the sorrow of the blues as an art form less dependent on vocal precision, than on musical precision and nuance that comes as the result of a blues sta- tement (Murray, 1976: 79). Instead of the twelve-measure technicalities of the blues form – the “Holy Trinity” (“three harmonies like the beginning, the middle, and the end of things. Three sung statements and three instrumental responses.) (Marsalis, 2008: 49), I am focused on look and feel of Killer of Sheep as a cinematic incantation of the blues statement to reflect “a sense of life that is affirmative”, despite blues lyrics that include, “the absurd, the unfortunate, and the catastrophic”, and to “reflect the person making the confrontation, his self-control, his sense of structure and style”, and the expression of among other things, “his sense of humor as well as his sense of ambiguity and his sense of possibility” (Murray, 1996: 208-209). These are all issues of portrayal and characterization for the filmmaker, as they are for the blues ba- lladeer (Murray, 1996: 21). In the case of Killer of Sheep, the soundtrack charts an unusual improvisational course throughout the film as more than accompaniment, but as a character (a balladeer) whose pre- sence imbues the movie with an overall blues feel that underscores the poetic modes of its visual story. The result is a blues nuance that dominates the film despite its soundtrack blen- ding jazz and blues with spiritual and folk music (Paul Robeson), along with R&B (Earth Wind & Fire) and classical (including George Gershwin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff). The film and its story have its objective correlative in the blues and Burnett extends cinematic language into the repertoire of the blues where “…the definitive blues statement is not verbal”, as words “however well chosen, are secondary to the music” because “what counts for most is not verbal precision (which is not to say vocal precision) but musical precision, or perhaps better still, musical nuance” (Murray, 1976: 79).
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