In 1977, a fresh graduate filmmaker from UCLA shoots a film in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles, where a large community of people of color is residing. The film is rarely screened – it’s a so-called „student film”, made for graduation purposes – and it takes a couple of years until it is actually seen. But once one finally sees it properly, the film becomes an undebatable classic of black cinema, endlessly cited for its deep and oftentimes poetic observations about a world that is mostly invisible, for the legitimate feeling of rage that is palpable between any two shots of the film. „A portrait of a family and of the neighborhood that it lives in became a chronicle about the resistance and heroism of African-Americans”, writes Thom Andersen in his magnificent essay-film, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), in which he playfully magnifies representations of L.A. in cinema that are all but flattering. Uncoincidentally, after having put most of the visual output of the city’s representations through sword and fire, Andersen’s documentary ends on a segment that is dedicated to the L.A. Rebellion movement, as a positive counterexample of sorts, in which the notion of respecting a city’s intimate geography is conjugated with a more transgressive way of practicing cinema.

Charles Burnett, the student who directed Killer of Sheep by digging deep into his own memories and by sometimes taking a glance at the surroundings, is probably (along with Haile Gerima) the front figure of the L.A. Rebellion. (He’s also the writer and cinematographer of another one of the movement’s masterpieces, Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts). In time, and also due to the fact that many hold his film as one of the finest debut films ever, Burnett came to be considered as one of the pillars of Afro-American cinema. Not inasmuch as one Spike Lee is – the herald of the black cause across the world, who nonchalantly crosses forwards and backwards through time, filling his films to the brim with memorable monologues and launching a big-budget subversive torpedo once every couple of years – but rather, as an honest chronicler of the community’s quotidian life, with its unexpected ups and daily downs, with its universal dramas and the specific racial stigma that affects it. To be a person of color in an African-American neighborhood is the most normal thing, after all – there is no confrontation between white and black people, as in Jordan Peele’s features – and even so, there is a constant conjecture of tension: there is a total absence of the police that would end up prying its nose into the story’s weight, which in time shows that the film is also working towards dismantling some of the well-known cliches of mainstream cinema.

Having said this, Killer of Sheep isn’t an overtly furious film, rather in its subtext, wherein it prefers to summon all the melancholia of a proletarian lifestyle in its shots, a life that has access all too rarely to financial comfort. The film exhausts its descriptive energy by endlessly fixating on these sloped streets with beat-up cars lining the sidewalks, unpaved back roads running behind the houses, leading to barren greenfields in which the children are playing cruel games. Stan (Henry G. Sanders), the protagonist, is a pater familias that is trying to set his offspring onto the right path, while also trying to convince himself that his own job at an abattoir is a virtuous alternative to so many other seedy ways of making a living, furrowing his brow and staring blankly ahead. One of his sons dons a sad dog mask and silently leaves the frame. One of his friends works on his car all day long. This is the way in which days go by in Watts, bursts of clear light in which languor and joblessness, ease and lack of occupation blend into each other. It’s fascinating how, far away (yet so close) to the luxury of the Beverly Hills mansions, far away (yet so close) to the Hollywood industry, Burnett inscribes a self-sufficient world onto the screen, paying wonderful attention to the small gestures which contain in themselves an ever so slight dose of humanity. It suffices to see this unexpectedly long scene in which two men are struggling to carry a car engine down the stairs and then into the back of a minivan, and as soon as they turn on the car and try to ride up towards the hillside, the engine falls onto the pavement and cracks into pieces. Everything had been a waste of time, and the art of Burnett’s craft lies in not knowing whether to laugh or to cry in front of their struggles.

One shouldn’t expect a heavy resolution in the end or some deus ex machina that would illuminate everything. The grand event of the film seems to be a trip outside the town, in a car filled to the brim with passengers, an escape that is brutally halted by a flat tire that forces everyone to turn around. One has the feeling that the film could go on effortlessly for a couple more reels, or even after the camera itself has long been turned off as if Burnett had placed his movie camera in the middle of a series of events that don’t need any kind of validation. It’s not as much of a parenthesis in the life of a couple of people, as it is an uninterrupted series of happenings which one was lucky enough to witness. Trusting in his material’s documentary fiber, in the roundness of the characters which exist beyond any motivations related to the script or any sociological archetypes (and how great it is to see a character that is coughing without this being the sign of a deadly disease that will claim his life in the end, but rather simply the manifestation of an actor that is actually living), in the neorealist power of wringing epiphanies out of a flint – here are just some of the hints that indicate a true filmmaker.

Killer of Sheep can be rented or purchased on Milestone Films.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.