Charles Burnett by Nelson Kim May 2003 b. April 13, 1944, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA filmography bibliography web resources I think a strong case can be made that Charles Burnett is the most gifted and important black filmmaker this country has ever had. But there’s a fair chance you’ve never heard of him… —Jonathan Rosenbaum [T]he least well-known great American filmmaker. —Armond White If [Killer of Sheep] were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We Keep The Conversation Going…Inspiring Action www.nommospeakersbureau.com | [email protected] | @nommospeakers (202) 505-3144 —Michael Tolkin Charles Burnett is the epitome of a cult hero—almost famous for not being famous. On the rare occasion his work attracts any notice in the mainstream press, the article will be sure to mention how little attention his work receives in the mainstream press. Despite the public acclaim of critics and fellow filmmakers, the festival awards and retrospectives, the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the Library of Congress’ selection of Killer of Sheep for its National Film Registry—despite his legendary status among a small cohort of cinephiles, Burnett goes unrecognized by the larger culture, the pop marketplace. His films are known to few. But among those few they’re loved by many. The best qualities of Burnett’s films are the very things that make them a tough sell in the mass-media world. The people in Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) don’t conform to the usual commercial-film typology of hero, villain, supporting player, love interest and comic relief. Like Renoir, Ozu, Altman, Leigh—like Chekhov—Burnett presents his characters in the round, justifying themselves to themselves. (In industry terms, that means there’s no one to root for.) He does not direct us to feel a certain way as the narratives unfold. At its best, his work is not easily digestible at one sitting: morally and emotionally complex, subtly layered with cultural references and mythic overtones, these films ask us not to judge them too quickly. (In industry terms, that means they’re slow and boring.) Finally, he’s black, and he rejects sensationalism, stereotype, and genre convention in favor of human-scaled, richly observed tales of African-American life. (In industry terms: he’s got no chance.) Burnett was born in Mississippi in 1944 and moved as a child to Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since. During the 1960s, after receiving a degree in electronics at Los Angeles Community College, he planned to pursue a career in engineering but instead enrolled in UCLA to study film. His student contemporaries included Haile Gerima (Sankofa, 1993) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991). Burnett credits his years at UCLA with shaping his sense of cinema as a social and political act: Charles Burnett: It was a wonderful place to be and I’m glad I went there…You didn’t make films for commercial reasons or using your student film as a calling card for Hollywood. Hollywood wasn’t accessible to black independent filmmakers, or films by people of color, unless they were black exploitation films. You never expected anything from Hollywood. Filmmaking was for you making personal and political statements. And one of the good things about UCLA was a teacher named Elyseo Taylor who started the Ethno-Communications department, a program to bring in people of color, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Afro-Americans. I was one of the Teacher Assistants in that group and the objective was to get people of color to tell stories about their community. A lot of positive things came out of it. All the people attending the course were there making films in response to false and negative images that Hollywood films were promoting. There was an anti-Hollywood attitude—but it was more than that, the focus was on you telling your story and working out an aesthetic. (1) Nelson Kim: I have a theory that there are two kinds of people who become serious filmmakers. One is the cinephile, the Scorseses and Godards—they fall in love with cinema, it’s all about cinema, and it’s only later they figure out _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We Keep The Conversation Going…Inspiring Action www.nommospeakersbureau.com | [email protected] | @nommospeakers (202) 505-3144 what sort of stories they want to tell with it. And the other kind already knows what stories they want to tell and then finds out that cinema is the way to do it. I would guess that you’re more of the second kind? CB: Yeah. Because there was all this activity going on in the ’60s and art was part of it. There was a lot of poetry being produced, short stories, plays and things like that and you were always asked, “What can you do?” You know, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution, that was the phrase of the time. So we knew the issues that we were trying to deal with, and the only way to do it was through the different forms of expressions, different media, and for some, films became a possible way to emphasize these things. After making several short films at UCLA, Burnett began work on his thesis project: a feature film, an episodic study of a blue-collar worker and family man in South Central Los Angeles. Killer of Sheep was financed, meagerly, by grants as well as Burnett’s own money, and shot on 16mm over a series of weekends with a cast of non-professional actors. Completed in 1973, it was not officially released (and then only in the most piecemeal way) until 1977. How did the storyline for Killer of Sheep develop? CB: I had been working with other filmmakers who were doing stories about working-class people and they were, I thought, sort of romanticizing it. These films were about working-class people but made by students who were far removed from that environment. I wanted to tell a story about a man who was trying to hold on to some values that were constantly being eroded by other forces, by his plight in the community, and the quality of the job that he had. At the same time he wanted to do right by his family. I didn’t want to impose my values on his situation. I just wanted to show his life. And I didn’t want to resolve his situation by imposing artificial solutions like him becoming a doctor or a diplomat, when the reality is that most people don’t get out. I wanted to show that there is a positive element to his life, and that is that he endures, he’s accepted it. The film unfolds in a loose, leisurely, seemingly improvised (but actually tightly scripted and storyboarded) flow of events. The photography is unadorned and unpretty. This is home-grown filmmaking: shooting something with your own friends and family in your own neighborhood, using real locations and sticking close to situations encountered in daily life. Killer of Sheep, in broad outline, might seem like the kind of movie anybody could make. But nobody else has ever made anything like it. One critic [Armond White] wrote that Killer of Sheep was in some ways your “response to the lies of blaxploitation.” Was that in any way true? CB: In some ways, yeah, in many ways. A lot of us were angry at those films because they became the only representation of our experience in the movies. So we were very conscious of knowing that’s who the enemy was, so to speak. And then _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We Keep The Conversation Going…Inspiring Action www.nommospeakersbureau.com | [email protected] | @nommospeakers (202) 505-3144 there were the seemingly positive images like Sidney Poitier movies which were great but they spoke more to the white community than the black community. We needed the spectrum, the full range of the black experience. Then there were also attempts at being positive and political with social-realist pictures where the issues are very clear: for example, there’s exploitation in a shop, the manager is exploiting the workers, so you have to have the people come together and form a strike. A clear-cut political solution. CB: Yeah. And then boom, you get your worker’s rights, and everyone is happy. But it wasn’t the case where I was living. And there were too many films I saw like that. And that troubled me equally as much as the black exploitation films. Killer of Sheep consists of a series of scenes in the life of Stan (Henry Gayle Saunders) and his family. The film begins in the most riveting and enigmatic way: a man is yelling at his young son for failing to defend his brother in a fight. Suddenly the boy’s mother steps forward and slaps the child across the face. All this happens quickly, the faces jamming the tightly packed frame and rubbing up against our eyes. We don’t ever learn who the boy is; he and his parents are never seen again—but Burnett has said in an interview that the scene is one of Stan’s childhood memories. The moment is not really explained or expanded upon during what follows; it exists to foreground the film’s theme of survival, of persevering in a world of shit. And underneath the harsh tone, one can sense the heart that powers Killer of Sheep and almost all of Burnett’s work: family love—intolerable, intractable, and irreplaceable.