Year: 1978
Director: Charles Burnett
As there won’t be another Sight and Sound poll before 2032, there’s no need to rush through the top fifty finest films of all time. Yesterday’s watch, recommended by a friend’s son, was perhaps the most obscure film in the top 50: Killer of Sheep was certainly a new one to me.
The film’s genesis is pretty remarkable. It was made on weekends over four or five years with a largely non-professional cast. Writer and director Charles Burnett submitted it as his masters thesis – the cinematic equivalent of turning in OK Computer as a Music Tech MA graduation final project. Once finished it was acclaimed at the Berlin Film Festival but was unreleasable as Burnett had stuffed the soundtrack with greats from a century of jazz and soul, but neglected to secure the rights to any of the music. Eventually film curators cleaned up the print and sorted the rights. It’s hardly widely available still – your only – cough – legal option a pricy secondhand dvd. A quick google however will reveal numerous online options, the one we ended up watching had subtitles but was fine.
The film itself is in black and white and barely eighty minutes long. Its central characters are Stan, whose job in a slaughterhouse gives the film its title, and his wife and children. There’s barely a plot, rather a series of episodes in the manner of Bicycle Theives that set out the harshness of lives in Watts LA. Stan and a friend buy a car engine with a vague idea of making money fixing up a banger, he is tempted by two hoods to get involved in a heist, fixes lino to the kitchen floor, and is propositioned by a white store owner . Friends drop by to try and borrow money, his nameless wife worries he is drifting away from her. All the characters are shot in static shots, often with the camera on the floor. The effect is to convey an exhaustion, a statis – a community fixed in place by the lack of education, opportunities, or any kind of agency.
The slow trudge of adulthood is contrasted with the quicksilver brilliance of youth. Burnett marshals expertly a gang of early teens who race, cycle and jump through the streets of Watts. They’re in perpetual motion, and in the most famous shot in the movie they leap above our heads from building to building. There are fights, disagreements but nothing that isn’t forgotten. In one terrifying scene they play on the railway tracks and try to move a boxcar while one of their gang lays his head down on the tracks just yards away. The camera tracks, pans and moves lithely around the streets following the gang.
Stan’s son and daughter link the adult and adolescent worlds: in one of the simplest and most powerful scenes the daughter sings along out of tune to Earth Wind and Fire, absorbed in play. Later on Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington soundtracks a wordless scene of grace and reconciliation between Stan and his wife: a testament to the compassion that people can show each other in the most difficult of circumstances.
The final, more heavy-handed element relates to Stan’s work. He is indeed a killer of sheep as his job is at a slaughterhouse. The scenes of the slaughterhouse, rapidly cut, recall nothing so much as the rhapsodic work scenes of Man With A Movie Camera.
This is not the best acted film, and at times the film barely holds together. But the cumulative effect of the crushing deprivation depicted and the powerlessness of the individuals depicted to change it, is very powerful. It’s a very good use of 80 minutes of your time and @kaisfatdad would be a great film club choice IMHO.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Bicycle Thieves, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning etc.
The use of music in this film does ask a number of questions. It’s a celebration and homage to a century of black music, from Joplin and Robeson to EWF. Some of the juxtapositions are incredibly powerful. But at times the images and music combine a little too neatly, and the film to modern and white eyes perhaps wanders uncomfortably into the kind of music video that marries heart-rending visuals of poverty to emotional music. But it demands watching however you feel.