Killer of Sheep

One of the things I found interesting and original about this film was the ironic and off-kilter use of music. The underscoring includes whistling and other disconcerting sounds that go against the standard, traditional cinematic grain. While black children play in the desolate Los Angeles cityscape we hear on the soundtrack Paul Robeson's recording of "The House I Live In," a song from 1945 that deals with the ideal of racial harmony in America; what a contrast between this high-minded song and the brutal reality of 30 years later. A scene of children throwing rocks at a passing train looks like a newsreel from one of any number of modern African countries in the grip of civil war and poverty. Director Charles Burnett faithfully and accurately captures the texture of daily life in a 70s slum where life is merely existence sustained by a vague but constant hope that things will improve one way or another. The domestic scenes are painful to watch, so barren and stunted are the characters' lives. Similar territory has been explored surrealistically by David Lynch (ERASERHEAD), satirically by John Waters (PINK FLAMINGOS) and with wry formality by Jim Jarmusch (STRANGER THAN PARADISE) but Burnett treats it as cinema verite.

Unfortunately the technical level of this film is only so-so (yes, I realize this was a student thesis project). Although the shots are interestingly composed, usually starting with a close up that makes you wonder what you are looking at and then widening to give you a context, the uneven sound recording and poor diction of several performers distance the viewer.

I think that for showing us the reality of this particular cluster of humanity at this particular time in history KILLER OF SHEEP deserves the attention it has been getting,

Somewhat reactionary to the black exploitation films that usually define the Black cinema experience in the 70's, Killer of Sheep presents a realistic portrait of a Black urban L.A. community. Burnett's method of telling a story, using the camera in the most unobtrusive manner, enlivens the film and draws the viewer into a world not frequently seen on film. Stan, the depressed insomniac lower middle-class worker struggles to provide for his family, love his wife and maintain responsibility to his community while haunted by the historical futility and impotence of the African American male. In Killer of Sheep, Burnett aptly demonstrates his knowledge of the cinema aesthetic and his proficiency with the camera while telling a most compelling story about the Black experience in America.

Raw American Poetry. Killer of Sheep takes the immediacy of Italian neo-Realist cinema and shapes it into a dreamy, beautiful montage of everyday life in Watts, Los Angeles, California, in the 1970s.

The revelations, in the year 2000, are surprising: black kids in the middle of the Ghetto acted up and goofed off exactly the same as white kids in small towns across the midwest...but not like black OR white kids today. The folks in this movie have an innocence about them that survives, along with their dignity, regardless of the social decay around them. You are left with a simple fact: these are still country people, who happen to be living in a city.

For anyone, like me, who grew up in the 1970s, the movie aches with a sense of a lost era, when being a kid meant building forts out of left-over construction materials, throwing dirt clods, and laying down big fat skidmarks with your bicycle.

And all this is just the subplot. The main storyline, of a slaughterhouse-working father trying to run a stable family in the midst of urban decay, is simple, understated, and powerful. The musical sequences inside the slaughterhouse rival Kubrick's ability to juxtapose music and image in a manner that creates infinite levels of meaning and irony. You can only sit with your mouth half agape and think, 'aaah.'

Like La Jetee, this is a movie that will allow you to see life anew, with children's eyes. Never pass up a chance to see it.

Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family.

Film critic Dana Stevens describes the film's plot as "a collection of brief vignettes which are so loosely connected that it feels at times like you're watching a non-narrative film." There are no acts, plot arcs or character development, as conventionally defined.

What happens in this film is not a documentary, but in many ways it may as well be. How many films really focus on the black community anywhere at any point in time? Very few. And this one does that, in all its gritty and glamorless reality.

Yes, can be cold. Young, soon too old. What a wonderful song and film as this song.

This is the picture here; a life of drab, interminable drudgery, hard work when it does come by and small pleasure, perhaps only the slow dance before the window. They will tell you the attempt here is for neorealism, and you will maybe note how the palette and commentary has been later studied by other prominent directors, black or not. Not so here. Our gain is that it's by a filmmaker who still hasn't learned too much about the craft to lose the innocence of looking and the commitment to keep doing so. Who doesn't have a hell of a lot to say and just wants to film. And who maybe knows this life and neighborhood intimately enough to take us to where it's ordinary and real.

All things considered, it's an evocative portrait of life at the outskirts. It's raw and affective in ways that Malick had to train himself over the years to accomplish. And that Jarmusch and Gordon Green (George Washington) only mechancically repeated in later years. It is about nothing in the sense that every life is, there is no story outside what we choose to remember as one.

So this earth can be cold. But maybe not so bitter after all. It's a moment of happiness that new life is finally on the way. Are they crazy? Who'd be happy to bring a child into this? Things don't work when they should, it's all an uphill struggle to even drive to the racetrack. Love grows distant and sullen. But the kids are playing everywhere you can find them. Young, soon too old. But happy that each one gets to go through it this once?