BY ALEX HO

In print | November 29, 2007

For the past year, various film webzines and blogs seem to have been all abuzz about the theatrical and DVD release of “Killer of Sheep”, a film that was made in 1977 for just $10,000 over a series of weekends as the masters thesis of then UCLA film school student Charles Burnett, but has since garnered all kinds of accolades, like the Critics’ Award at the Berlin Film Festival. The sudden attention to a film, that I had never heard of, got me curious: How is it that a film declared a “national treasure” by the Library of Congress has not seen proper distribution for 30 years ?

As it turns out, Burnett had adorned his film with various pieces of music, whose rights he had not attained. The film was finally released in a limited number of theaters on March 30 this year in a restored 35mm print by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and fully licensed musical score. It was only on Nov. 13 that the film was released on DVD.

Having seen “Killer of Sheep” on Nov. 17 at the Film Society screening, I was left even more curious. Was this meandering, unassuming film the same one that critics had been raving about? That was listed as one of the National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films? “Killer of Sheep,” which focuses on an African-American couple living in the Watts district of Los Angeles, proceeds as a series of largely uneventful, unrelated episodes. Some have likened Burnett’s fly-on-the-wall mode of filmmaking to French New Wave and Italian neorealism, and “Killer of Sheep” certainly benefits from the same lack of conventional entertaining cues of those films. The reason why “Killer of Sheep” has, as many critics have noted, aged well in comparison to its contemporaries is because the film doesn’t really cater to any particular formula and extracting a message from the film is pretty damn hard.

An argument could be made that “Killer of Sheep” is a social commentary on where the black community had been left in our country’s urban sprawl after the Civil Rights Movement. A scene where children play in a junkyard with the only toys that they can get their hands on, like a tire, unfolds against the patriotic song “The House that I Live In”, which sings, “What is America to me? … All races, all religions, that’s America to me.” The satirical intention is blaring, but this is one of the few moments that seems charged with a palpable rage.

Burnett doesn’t preach, and his purview of a community left behind, if depressing, also documents his characters’ everyday tasks with an undeniable love. Racial conflict is barely touched; hardly any white people can be seen in the film. There is one prominent white character, and she is a corpulent convenience store owner, who both condescendingly manhandles her black employee and flirts with Stan, our film’s protagonist. Having come in the wake of the blaxploitation film, “Killer of Sheep” must have been an admirable feat of restraint.

“Killer of Sheep” spends a large amount of its running time following the idyllic playtime of its children. A group of rowdy boys have a rock-throwing battle and play along train tracks. Two girls humiliate a smaller boy and push him off his bike. In one harrowing scene, three boys board a bike and, chased by dogs, almost get hit by a car. The image of kids leaping between two building tops would be incredibly poetic if it weren’t so incredibly scary. These sequences are contrasted with moments like the film’s introduction, where a boy is scolded for getting his brother hurt. “You’re a man now,” the father says, and we see his frustration and his anxiety over making his son understand what a harsh and unfair world he lives in. Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” plays repeatedly throughout the film.

Of course, prominent in the film are issues of class. The film screening may as well have been a Class Awareness Month event. When one of Stan’s friends tells him, “Now you think you’re middle class,” Stan retorts, “Man, I ain’t poor. Look, I give things away to the salvation army. You can’t give things away to the salvation army and call yourself poor.”

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