{"id":85,"date":"2007-11-03T17:45:46","date_gmt":"2007-11-03T22:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=85"},"modified":"2021-08-26T09:25:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T14:25:11","slug":"killer-of-sheep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/03\/killer-of-sheep\/","title":{"rendered":"Killer of Sheep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charles Burnett grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the scene of the 1965 Watts Riots in which thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand people were injured. Burnett was part of a group of African-American filmmakers \u2013 Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodberry \u2013 who came out of the UCLA film program during the blaxploitation years of the 1970s. While completing his MFA degree, Burnett received the Louis B. Mayer grant for the most promising thesis film, which became Killer of Sheep <\/em>(1977). The film\u00a0remained largely unseen by the general public for several years, and soon after became nearly unavailable (due to copyright issues) despite its strong critical reputation and official landmark status. Originally shot on 16mm black-and-white film, Killer of Sheep<\/em> has been restored and blown up to 35mm by Milestone Films. Thirty years after the fact, Killer of Sheep<\/em> finally received a belated theatrical release, grossing over $400,000 domestically at the box office, a very respectable figure for an indie re-issue. The long-awaited DVD version<\/a> of the film, which includes Burnett\u2019s re-edited second feature My Brother\u2019s Wedding<\/em> (1983) will be available on November 13. Along with the earlier DVD release of Gus Van Sant\u2019s Mala Noche<\/em><\/a>, this is a cause for celebration for anyone interested in the history of American independent film.<\/p>\n

In my book on independent screenwriting, Me and You and Memento and Fargo<\/a><\/em>, I discuss variations on the conventional goal-driven protagonist by analyzing what happens when screenwriters employ passive (Safe<\/em>) or ambivalent (Stranger Than Paradise<\/em>) protagonists, or when they shift the protagonists midstream (Fargo<\/em>). The protagonist of Burnett\u2019s Killer of Sheep,<\/em> who works in a slaughterhouse, is closest to Safe<\/em>\u2019s Carol White when it comes to the issue of agency. As a result of being subjected to the everyday horrors of his environment, Stan suffers from insomnia, impotence, and a growing sense of depression about his dead-end life. Killer of Sheep<\/em> begins with a flashback from Stan\u2019s childhood, in which he is yelled at for not defending his brother in a fight. His father insists he\u2019s not a child anymore and that he better start understanding what life\u2019s about. Stan also gets slapped across the face by his mother. But Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders) turns out to be less a fighter than a weary survivor. He\u2019s so beaten down by life\u2019s daily grind, especially by the dehumanizing effects of his job, that Stan suffers from inertia. Given the social milieu that Burnett portrays, it\u2019s not hard to understand why. Killer of Sheep<\/em> depicts the physical violence and the sense of despair and hopelessness that pervades life in the ghetto. It provides a glimpse of a world many viewers don\u2019t know anything about, especially because we\u2019re never given an opportunity to see this type of representation in mainstream Hollywood cinema<\/p>\n

When Stan complains to\u00a0Oscar early in the film that he\u2019s working himself into his own hell \u2013 he can\u2019t sleep at night and doesn\u2019t have peace of mind \u2013 his friend responds, “Why don\u2019t you kill yourself; you\u2019ll be a lot happier.”\u00a0Stan later presses a warm cup of coffee to his cheek and suggests that it reminds him of making love to a woman., but another friend, Bracy, pokes fun at Stan by remarking, “Myself, I don\u2019t go for women who got malaria.” As Stan struggles against the travails of his day-to-day existence, various threats surface. The unattractive white female owner of the liquor store tries to proposition Stan by offering him a job, but Stan worries about the danger of getting shot in a holdup. Two acquaintances, Scooter and Smoke, attempt to get Stan to accompany them in some type of criminal activity\u00a0involving murder. When Stan\u2019s wife (Kaycee Moore) overhears them, she confronts the two men:<\/p>\n

STAN\u2019S WIFE: Why you always want to hurt somebody?
\nScooter looks around to see if she might be talking with someone else.
\n<\/em>SCOOTER: Who me? That\u2019s the way nature is. I mean, an animal has his teeth and a man has his fists. That\u2019s the way I was brought up, god damn me.
\nSMOKE: Right on.
\nSCOOTER: I mean, when a man\u2019s got scars on his mug from dealing with son of a bitches everyday for his natural life. Ain\u2019t nobody going over this nigger, just dry long so. Now me and Smoke here, we\u2019re taking our issue. You be a man if you can, Stan.
\nSTAN\u2019S WIFE: Wait! You wait just one minute! You talk about being a man and standing up. Don\u2019t you know there\u2019s more to it than with your fists, the scars on your mug, you talking about an animal. Or what? You think you\u2019re still in the bush or some damn where? You\u2019re here. You use your brain; that\u2019s what you use. Both of you nothing ass niggers got a lot of nerve coming over here doing some shit like that.<\/p>\n

Scooter\u2019s equation of masculinity with violence takes on bitterly ironic overtones because Stan\u2019s job and depression cause him to lose his sexual drive, driving an emotional wedge between him and his wife. Stan\u2019s wife short-circuits Scooter and Smoke\u2019s attempt to involve Stan in their murder plans, but the scene underscores the constant temptations for someone like Stan, who denies his own poverty by claiming that he gives things to The Salvation Army and by comparing himself to other less fortunate neighbors. Stan tells Bracy: “We may not have a damn thing some time. You want to see somebody that\u2019s poor, now you go around and look at Walter\u2019s. Now they be sitting over an oven with nothing but a coat on, and sitting around rubbing their knees, all day eating nothing but wild greens picked out of a vacant lot. No, that ain\u2019t me and damn sure won\u2019t be.”<\/p>\n

This discussion of poverty actually causes Stan to make one proactive attempt to take action, which provides the only semblance of a plot thread in an otherwise impressionistic film consisting of a series of vignettes. Right after this, he tells another friend, Gene, who wants to better himself by getting a car, “Tomorrow after I cash my check, let\u2019s go over to Silbo\u2019s and buy that motor and put it in.” True to his word, Stan cashes his check at the liquor store, and he and Gene show up at Silbo\u2019s to dicker over the price of the motor. While there, Silbo\u2019s nephew lies on the floor with a large white bandage wrapped around his head. When Gene asks what happened, it turns out that two men beat him up, and one kicked him in the face. After Stan asks why, the man answers, “He didn\u2019t have nothing else to do with his hands and feet, nigger.” The nephew later makes crass sexual remarks to a woman named Delores, whose later response \u2013 “You about as tasteless as a carrot” \u2013 turns\u00a0out to be one of the best lines in the film. Delores follows this by also kicking the injured man in his head. In the midst of the ensuing ruckus, Silbo agrees to take fifteen dollars for the motor.<\/p>\n

Stan and Gene lug the heavy motor out of the house, down the wooden stairs, and eventually place it in back of the pickup truck. Gene injures himself in the process and refuses to secure it any further. He insists it will be fine. After the two men hop inside, the truck lurches backward rather than forward, causing the motor to fall off. Stan and Gene get out, realize that the block of motor is now cracked, and simply leave it there. We watch a little girl\u2019s face pressed up against the rear window of the truck cabin. The camera moves in closer and then pulls away from the motor, which remains where it has fallen in the street.<\/p>\n

This sudden flattening of a dramatic arc is mirrored again toward the end of the film when Gene finally gets his car running and they all set off for the racetrack. Their expectations, however, quickly get deflated when the car develops a flat tire and Gene doesn\u2019t have a spare. Bracy raps: “Man, I\u2019m out here singing the blues, got my money on a horse can\u2019t lose, and you\u2019re out here on a flat. I always told you to keep a spare, but you\u2019s a square. That\u2019s why you can\u2019t keep no spare. Now how are we going to get there, huh?” All of them get back into the car. A number of critics \u2013 from Armond White and Michael Tolkien to J. Hoberman<\/a> and Manohla Dargis<\/a> \u2013 have discussed Killer of Sheep<\/em> in terms of Italian neo-realism, but I don\u2019t find the comparison totally accurate. Films, such as Rossellini\u2019s Open City<\/em> or DeSica\u2019s Bicycle<\/em> Thieves<\/em> \u2013 two films often cited as influences \u2013 have strong dramatic arcs, whereas Burnett either ignores or undercuts them. Like many independent filmmakers, such as Jim Jarmusch in Stranger than <\/em>Paradise,<\/em> Gus Van Sant in Mala Noche<\/a><\/em> or Allison Anders in Gas Food Lodging<\/em>, Burnett is less interested in creating dramatic tension than in characterization. Burnett\u2019s real focus is on creating a portrait of Stan\u2019s life within this particular social milieu. Nothing changes in the course of the film for Stan, so that his character lacks an arc as well.<\/p>\n

Throughout Killer of Sheep<\/em>, Burnett continually draws a comparison between the fate of the neighborhood children and the slaughter of sheep. After the initial flashback, the film shifts to the present, where Stan\u2019s son, Stan Jr.,\u00a0ducks behind a wooden shield, as rocks ricochet off it. The kids engage in a full-fledged rock fight. One of them appears to get hurt, but after a brief pause, the fighting erupts again. The next shot is from a moving train as the kids hurl rocks at it. Burnett depicts a barren landscape of dust and dirt and almost no vegetation, except for occasional palm trees. The kids play on a train, pretending to push the one of the cars on top of a kid lying on the tracks. In the neighborhood of South Central, even play has become a constant battleground. When Stan Jr. later returns home, he sees two guys stealing a TV set. Stan Jr. tells them that the well-dressed man we see standing there is going to call the police. This suggests that Stan Jr. is already at risk in terms of his identification with the perpetrators of the crime rather than the victim.<\/p>\n

When we first meet his father, Stan, he\u2019s busy doing home repair work. In this scene, his daughter, Angela, wears a huge dog mask, which seems to reference Helen Leavitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee\u2019s classic documentary, In the Street<\/em>. When a friend asks him when he last went to church, Stan answers not since “back home.” The suggests the effects of dislocation that African Americans have experienced as a result of the migration from the rural, agrarian South to urban centers such as Los Angeles \u2013 a subject that Burnett would explore in his later film To Sleep With Anger<\/a> <\/em>(1990). In a mean gesture, Stan Jr. scrunches his sister\u2019s dog mask before running off. Stan\u2019s two other friends also poke at the little girl\u2019s mask as they walk by. Angela goes outside and hangs on the fence with her hand in her mouth, while a little boy stands nearby. Such a scene is thematically evocative, but doesn\u2019t\u00a0advance the narrative in any conventional way.<\/p>\n

In the overall structure of Killer of Sheep<\/em>, poetic details, such as Angela wearing the dog mask, are given equal weight in the narrative. The script for the eighty-three minute film is only about seventeen pages long, suggesting that Killer of Sheep<\/em> relies primarily on visual storytelling and contains very little dialogue. When we think of the Killer of Sheep<\/em>, we remember its striking images, including those at the factory, where the Judas goats leads the sheep to slaughter. For instance, there\u2019s the scene in which Angela sings off-key to a song by Earth, Wind & Fire, while she plays with a doll. Other scenes include: the kids trying to spin tops in the rubble; the scene where the older girls are dancing and the boy on the bike tries to act like a tough guy and they beat him up and he goes away crying; the dangerous shots from below of the kids jumping across the tops of buildings; the scene toward the end when Stan comes home from the factory and knocks over the two kids who are doing handstands and headstands. There\u2019s also the scene where a man in a soldier uniform wants his clothes back, while a woman upstairs brandishes a gun, and her two young children sit on the couch nearby. This tense situation provides entertainment for the entire neighborhood, including Stan, who witnesses the incident while passing by.<\/p>\n

There are scenes between Stan and his wife, which show her sexual frustration. In one, which reminds me of a scene from Stan Brakhage\u2019s early trance film, Reflections of Black<\/em>, Stan and his wife dance to music of Dinah Washington\u2019s “This Bitter Earth.” For his wife, the dancing has an erotic charge, but Stan, who is shirtless, appears to be merely going through the motions. After the record ends, she attempts to engage in foreplay, but Stan extricates himself and leaves his wife standing alone against the sunlit window. In voiceover, we hear what sounds like a poem: “Memories that just don\u2019t seem mine, like half-eaten cake, rabbit skins stretched on the back yard fences. My grandma, mot dear, mot dear, mot dear, dragging her shadows across the porch. Standing bareheaded under the sun, cleaning red catfish with white rum.” Stan\u2019s wife picks up a pair of white baby shoes and presses them against her bosom, then exits the frame. The scene lasts nearly four minutes. After he returns from work later on, Stan, his wife and daughter are all together in the kitchen. His wife suggests to Stan that they go to bed, but Stan sits silently at the table while she clears the dishes. Angela comes over to her Daddy. She puts her arms around his neck. He looks at her lovingly, while Angela stares at her mother, who sits there despondently. Burnett ends the sequence by framing the shot from behind the wife, so that we watch Angela playfully touch her father\u2019s face and then look over for her mother\u2019s reaction.<\/p>\n

The above scene is appropriately followed by the one of the little girl in the dress, who carefully places freshly laundered clothes on the line. Burnett cuts to a shot of a hole in a garage door. A boy crawls out, walks over, and spies on the girl. He returns to the hole, and four more kids of varying sizes climb out. Burnett cuts back to the girl, whose back is turned, and the boys throw dirt all over the clothes hanging on the clothesline. As she turns and stares, the camera holds on her haunting look, which parallel\u2019s the one of both Stan\u2019s wife and daughter in the previous scene. Burnett cuts from the young girl in the dress to shots of the Judas goats at the slaughterhouse.<\/p>\n

Burnett usually composes a shot and then doesn\u2019t cut unless it\u2019s absolutely necessary, which results in a film that manages to take its sweet time. Besides its leisurely pace and episodic rather than dramatic structure, Killer of Sheep<\/em> maintains the overall feel and texture of an independent film in other ways than its initial minuscule\u00a0$10,000 budget. Its overall narration is much closer to international art cinema than classical Hollywood. Killer of Sheep<\/em> employs symbolism and ambiguity \u2013 two characteristics of art cinema. Plot is also minimized in favor of the film\u2019s densely layered visual imagery. The film\u2019s central metaphor, reinforced by the title, would no doubt seem too obvious were it not made by one of America\u2019s greatest film poets. This remarkable restored version allows viewers to see the film as Charles Burnett originally envisioned it, even if he lacked the necessary resources at the time. Killer of Sheep<\/em> is quite simply one of the best first features ever made, as well as one of the true classics of American independent cinema.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charles Burnett grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the scene of the 1965 Watts Riots in which thirty-four people were killed and over a thousand people were injured. Burnett was part of a group ofRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":86,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4280,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/4280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}