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Charles Burnett: Interviews (March 10, 2011) Charles Burnett: Interviews (March 10, 2011) INTRODUCTION Charles Burnett is a ground-breaking African-American filmmaker and one of this country‘s greatest directors, yet he remains largely unknown. His films, most notably Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), are considered classics, yet few filmgoers have seen them or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the making of a rare film master whose work brings to the screen the texture and poetry of life in the black community. As a supremely talented and fiercely independent film director, Burnett makes movies according to his own unique artistic vision and socially engaged viewpoint. His films‘ best qualities—rich characterizations, morally and emotionally complex narratives, and intricately observed tales of African-American life ―subtly layered with cultural references and mythic overtones‖—are precisely what make his films such a ―tough sell‖ in the mass marketplace (see Nelson Kim‘s profile of Burnett in sensesofcinema.com, 2003; not included in this volume). Hollywood, as the interviews presented here reveal, has been largely inept in responding to the challenges of marketing Burnett‘s films. And no one is more aware of it than Burnett, who told Terrence Rafferty in 2001, ―It just takes an extraordinary 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.‘‖ Against the odds, Burnett did keep going. This book provides a window into three decades of his directorial career, during which he produced an extraordinary body of work. It focuses on his status as a true independent filmmaker and explores his Charles Burnett: Interviews Introduction p. 2 of 22 motivation for involving himself in films that all chronicle some aspect of the black experience in America. As a film student in UCLA‘s Graduate Program in Film and Television Production during the 1970s, Burnett, along with fellow students like Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, set out to tell stories that rejected Hollywood stereotypes that depicted the black community in strictly negative terms—drug infested, violent, malevolent and dysfunctional. Eventually this group of young filmmakers would come to be known as alternatively the ―L.A. School of Black Filmmakers‖ and the ―L.A. Rebellion.‖ Burnett‘s student films included two shorts, Several Friends (1969) and The Horse (1973) and his feature-length MFA thesis film, Killer of Sheep (1977), an unusually complex and poetic vision of African-American life set in the Watts section of Los Angeles. As Burnett saw it, these three films (and the rest that would follow) ―offered insights‖ to black viewers about their own experiences growing up black in America. His films were in sharp contrast to the ―action-packed dramas‖ produced by Hollywood that, according to Burnett, had reduced the black community to ―drugs and mothers who prostitute themselves … I can sell a plot to a studio, I believe, about situations where a girl is on drugs, her brother is on drugs, their mother is on drugs, and their father disappeared and there is this white guy who is going to come and save the young boy or something like that‖ (American Film, 1991). ―When I was in UCLA,‖ recalls Burnett, ―we were making independent films because we wanted to do something positive. Not necessarily to entertain‖ (Boston Globe, May 28, 1995; not included in this collection). ―It was a period [the late 1960s and 1970s] when there was a lot of social activism [and] people were Charles Burnett: Interviews Introduction p. 3 of 22 really using arts as a means to social change. Film was there, and I gravitated towards it‖ (Sight and Sound, 2008). Burnett‘s first feature film, Killer of Sheep (1977), made the rounds at a number of European film festivals during the late seventies and early eighties, and went on to win the prestigious Critics Award at the 1981 Berlin Festival. Yet, as he reflected on this early phase of his career in an interview (Ponsoldt, 2007), Burnett recalled: ―When Killer of Sheep won the Critics‘ Award at the Berlin Film Festival it was in all the European newspapers but when I came back to the U.S., there was no press.‖ In fact, by the early l980s, Burnett‘s work had begun to capture a glimmer of critical attention, principally in European film publications. This book opens with two interviews from that period published in France (McMullin, 1980; Arnaud and Lardau, 1981; see also ―Black Independents: Interview with Charles Burnett‖ in Skrien, a film magazine from the Netherlands, April 1981, not included here). Catherine Arnaud and Yann Lardau, writing in La Revue du cinéma in 1981, explore early influences that motivated Burnett to become a filmmaker and how those influences helped shape his approach to the medium. We learn that in film school at UCLA Burnett took a course from the British documentary filmmaker Basil Wright, who, says Burnett, ―made me understand that the cinema was something serious, capable of expressing the nature and the dignity of man. He also made me understand the value of the documentary, the importance of not imposing your own values on the topics you film … He brought a certain humanism to my way of seeing things.‖ Charles Burnett: Interviews Introduction p. 4 of 22 …Monona Wali‘s interview with Burnett, the first to appear in an American film publication (The Independent, October 1988), gives the reader a profound sense of what it was like for Burnett and other Black Americans of his generation growing up in the South Central section of Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s. ―I was a product of that [period just before the] Civil Rights Movement. You really felt your limitation. Your reality was a few square blocks. You felt this was your only world, and the only way to get out of it was to join the service.‖ Burnett, instead, chose college (his way, we will learn in later interviews, to avoid the draft) and ―began to see another world—that there‘s something more to life than thinking that by the time you‘re 20 you‘re going to be dead … And then I saw all these other people who seemed healthier—enjoying life— particularly when I went to UCLA.‖ The interview includes an insightful discussion of Killer of Sheep. We learn that at UCLA Burnett had seen a number of films about working class life but could not relate to them in terms of his own experiences growing up in South Central Los Angeles. In these films, according to Burnett, ―issues were idealized, and … conflicts … reduced to problems between management and labor.‖ Management exploits the workers, the union calls a strike, and the workers are saved. These were films, says Burnett, with a built-in resolution. By contrast, the issues in Burnett‘s neighborhood, as he saw them, were completely different. ―What was essential was finding a job, working, making enough money, and then, at the end of the day, coming home and still trying to show signs of life.‖ In fact, according to Burnett, that was what Killer of Sheep was really all about: ―It‘s about how Stan, the main character, loses his sensitivity and still tries to maintain a certain kind of dignity. You can see at the very beginning [a child] traumatized by a fact Charles Burnett: Interviews Introduction p. 5 of 22 of life. The father tells the little boy, ‗If you see your brother‘s in a fight, you help him, whether your brother‘s right or wrong. You don‘t stand and watch. You go and help your brother.‘ Which is OK, but you can imagine what effect this has if you have a conscience and are developing a moral concept. It was that kind of conflict that I was interested in trying to portray. How do you work in this environment? How do you maintain a certain amount of dignity? I wanted to show what price it takes to survive. How you survive is a personal choice. I don‘t think a film should tell you A happens, and then B, and then C will necessarily follow. Life isn‘t necessarily that simple. Films have a tendency to generalize, to reduce complex issues.‖ The release and critical reception of To Sleep with Anger (1990) mark an important turning point in Burnett‘s career. Tackling the fractured struggles between good and evil within a middle-class black Angelino family, the film appeared at a number of film festivals (including Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, and New York), winning a special jury prize at Sundance. It opened to mostly enthusiastic reviews, and went on to win Independent Spirit Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay and special awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the American Film Institute. Not surprisingly, a number of interviews with Burnett were published around this time and several are included in this volume. Particularly newsworthy for this period are the Burnett profiles published in the Village Voice (August 22, 1989 and October 16, 1990), LA Weekly (October 12, 1990), the Los Angeles Times (August 12, 1989 and October 24, 1990), and the New York Amsterdam News (November 3, 1990) — among the first media to introduce and, in some cases, actively champion Burnett‘s career in the United States. (The Village Voice and LA Weekly profiles are included in this volume.) It would be Charles Burnett: Interviews Introduction p. 6 of 22 several years before detailed profiles of Burnett start appearing in influential dailies like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe… Lisa Kennedy‘s 1990 profile of Burnett appeared in the Village Voice less than two weeks after To Sleep with Anger opened in Manhattan.
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