Charles Burnett has been living with “Killer of Sheep” for more than half a century.
Burnett, 81, shot “Killer of Sheep” on black-and-white 16mm in the early 1970s for less than $10,000. Originally Burnett’s thesis film at UCLA, it was completed in 1978. In the coming years, “Killer of Sheep” would be hailed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and one of the finest film debuts, ever. Though it didn’t receive a widespread theatrical release until 2007, the blues of “Killer of Sheep” have sounded across generations of American movies.
And time has only deepened the gentle soulfulness of Burnett’s film, a portrait of the slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his young family in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. “Killer of Sheep” was then, and remains, a rare chronicle of working-class Black life, radiant in lyrical poetry — a couple slow dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” boys leaping between rooftops — and hard-worn with daily struggle.
A new 4K restoration — complete with the film’s full original score — is now playing in theaters, an occasion that recently brought Burnett from his home in Los Angeles to New York, where he met The Associated Press shortly after arriving.
Burnett’s career has been marked by revival and rediscovery (he received an honorary Oscar in 2017), but this latest renaissance has been an especially vibrant one. In February, Kino Lorber released Burnett’s “The Annihilation of Fish,” a 1999 film starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave that had never been commercially distributed. It was widely hailed as a quirky lost gem about a pair of lost souls.
On Friday, Lincoln Center launches “L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,” a film series about the movement of 1970s UCLA filmmakers, including Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry, who remade Black cinema.
The Mississippi-born, Watts-raised Burnett is soft-spoken but has much to say — only some of which has filtered into his seven features (among them 1990’s “To Sleep With Anger”) and numerous short films (some of the best are “When It Rains” and “The Horse”). The New Yorker’s Richard Brody once called the unmade films of Burnett and his L.A. Rebellion contemporaries “modern cinema’s holy spectres.”
But on a recent spring day, Burnett’s mind was more on Stan of “Killer of Sheep.” Burnett sees his protagonist’s pain and endurance less as a thing of the past than as a frustratingly eternal plight. If “Killer of Sheep” was made to capture the humanity of a Black family and give his community a dignity that had been denied them, Burnett sees the same need today. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: The most abiding quality in your films seems to me to be tenderness. Where did you get that?
BURNETT: I grew up in a neighborhood (Watts) where everyone was from the South. There was a lot of tradition. It was a different culture, a different group of people living there — people who had experienced a great deal and kept their humanity. And they had a work ethic. It was a nice atmosphere. People looked after you. I grew up with people who were very gentle. There were the Watts riots when you couldn’t walk down the street without police harassing you. Police would stop me and do this forensic search and call you all kind of names while doing it. But in the riots, it wasn’t that people got braver. They just got tired. When people got together, they always had the perspective of: Let the kids eat first.
Q: In “Killer of Sheep,” like your short “The Horse,” you seem to be giving a great deal of thought to the future of these children, and their preparation for the cruelty of the world.
BURNETT: In “Killer of Sheep,” kids were learning how to be men or women. The changing point was when Emmett Till and his picture was being shown everywhere in Jet magazine. All of a sudden, it was no longer this fantasy. You were now aware of the cruelty of the world. I remember a kid who had come home abused, who supposedly fell down the stairs. You learned this dual reality to life.
Q: When you watch “Killer of Sheep” again, what do you see?
BURNETT: Life going by. A life that should have been totally different. In high school, I had a teacher who would go walking down the aisle pointing at students saying, “You’re not going to be anything, you’re not going to be anything.” He got to me and said, “You’re not going to be anything.” Now, (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis wants to destroy Black history. It’s always a battle.
Q: What could have been different?
BURNETT: Young kids were capable of so much more. We were all looking for a place where you felt like you belonged. America could have been so much greater. The whole world could have been better.
Q: In thinking about what could have been different after “Killer of Sheep,” would you include yourself in that? You’re acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking American filmmakers yet the movie industry often wasn’t welcoming.
BURNETT: You do the best you can with what you have. There are so many things you want to say. What you find is that sometimes you work with people that don’t see eye to eye. Even though I didn’t do more, it’s still more than what some people made, by far. I’m very happy about that. On the flip side, a lot of times you hear, “Your films changed my life.” And if you can get that, then you’re doing good. One of the things that I found is that people will take advantage of you and make you make the film that they want to make. You need to be somehow independent where you can tell them, “No, I’m not doing this.” I had to do that a number of times. So you don’t work that often.
Q: To you, what’s the legacy of “Killer of Sheep”?
BURNETT: One of the reasons I did “Killer of Sheep” the way I did, with kids in the community working in all areas of the production, was to show them that they could do it. I made the film to restore our history, so young people could grow from it and know: I can do this. Even when I was in film school, there was a film production going on in my neighborhood. I was on my bike and I rolled over to see. I asked a guy, “What set is this?” and he acted like I wouldn’t understand. It’s changed a bit but there’s still this attitude. You look at what Trump and these guys are doing with DEI. It’s this constant battle. It can never end. You have to constantly prove yourself. It’s a battle, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing.
