Died in the Wool

The resurrected Killer of Sheep takes an unvarnished look at life.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

FLOCK of ages: In Killer of Sheep, even innocent child's play reflects a harsh reality. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Great artwork embraces contradiction, and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep grabs it with both arms. At once lyrical and earthbound, tender and brutal, timeless and immediate, his portrait of life in a Los Angeles ghetto has suffered an appropriately schismatic fate. Shot in the mid-'70s on little more than pocket change, the film has been certified as an American landmark, preserved in the National Film Registry and listed in countless histories and textbooks.

It's also been ignored and nearly impossible to see, in large part because Burnett's liberal use of African-American pop and blues posed a substantial barrier to commercial release. It took Milestone Films six years and $150,000 (more than 15 times the film's budget) just to clear the music rights. (There were rumors that Burnett was going to rescore the film with less troublesome songs; in the end, only Dinah Washington's closing-credits version of "Unforgettable" proved unobtainable.)

Although he was raised in Watts, Burnett was born in Mississippi, and he regards his adopted hometown with an eye both familiar and estranged. The movie's largely amateur cast tosses off wisecracks with unpracticed ease; one woman rebuffs a would-be player by telling him he's "as tasteless as a carrot." But Killer's jagged editing and fluid dissolves give it an otherworldly feel at odds with its neorealist substance. The movie is in the ghetto but not of it, standing apart and watching with an artist's eye. The subject matter prompts knee-jerk comparisons to Rosselini and De Sica, but with its elusive structure and plain-spoken surrealism, Killer bears as much resemblance to another L.A.-shot feature released in the same year: Eraserhead.

The film's title refers literally to Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a soft-spoken father of two who works nights in an abattoir. But a slower, more insidious slaughter is taking place with each crushing day. For all its visual poetry and flashes of humor, the movie is fundamentally about the obliteration of hope, and the futile but self-defining struggle against it. Burnett smash-cuts from a group of children running to a line of skinned sheep swaying on hooks, but the move seems less intended to equate the two images than to place them as points on a continuum of life and death. (The film ends with a similar juxtaposition.)

Burnett finds beauty in brutality, but without aestheticizing it. The movie opens in the middle of a dirt fight, as boys in a vacant lot hurl clods and the occasional rock at each other while ducking behind plywood shields. The editing is jagged, jarring; the children's play is innocent but hard, acting out what they already understand as the harshness of the world. One boy, who turns out to be Stan's son, ends up crying, as he will almost every time the boys roughhouse. Even idle play has its victims.

Against that harshness, Burnett pits the hurt and smiling resignation of the blues. As Little Walter sings, it's a "mean old world," but there's nothing to do but roll with the punches. Stan takes pride in small victories, every step above the poverty line and away from his rural origins. When he comes home from the slaughterhouse, he sips tea from china cups and scolds his children for talking "country." "I ain't poor," he indignantly corrects a friend. "You can't give away stuff to the Salvation Army if you're poor."

In one interlude, Stan and a friend travel across town to buy a used engine for Stan's broken-down car. After waiting for what seems like hours, they finally make a deal, which leaves only for them to maneuver the monstrous hunk of metal down a rickety flight of stairs and into the back of a pickup truck. The two men's struggle has deliberate shades of Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, and Burnett stages the scene with comic inevitability. As they heave the engine just past the edge of the pickup's bed, the camera hangs low, waiting until they drive off and the engine crashes inevitably to earth.

Killer of Sheep is full of such frustrated attempts, like the haunting moment when, as Washington's "This Bitter Earth" plays, Stan and his wife tenderly embrace each other and then drift slowly apart. But Burnett doesn't bemoan suffering so much as he expresses it. Like a song, the movie is organized by mood, coalescing around moments rather than expressing any desire to move forward.

Burnett may be among the most esteemed filmmakers of his generation, but his influence has been tragically small, unless you count the slavish imitations of David Gordon Green. Killer of Sheep is as singular now as it must have been in 1977. It's been 13 years since The Glass Shield, the last of Burnett's films to receive a theatrical release, and although he has continued to make interesting and vital work (often for TV), his absence from screens speaks to the dwindling value of the momentary experience Killer celebrates. Since it was never technically released the first time around, the film will probably sneak into a few critics' polls under the Army of Shadows exception. But wouldn't it be nice if, next year, there was a new Burnett film to vote for?

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Killer of Sheep | Written and directed by Charles Burnett | A Milestone release