Runtime: 80 minutes
Directed by: Charles Burnett
Starring: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry
From: Milestone Films
I mentioned not that long ago that cinema verite and slice-of-life movies aren’t always for me. However, I was glad to finally check out this film that there’s been an interest in checking out for years yet the trigger wasn’t pulled even when it was added to the Criterion Channel a few months ago. The platform’s 24/7 service playing the film finally gave me the impetus to cross this off of my figurative queue, it of what has to be thousands of movies still. There were times when this movie was impossible to track down (legally); the soundtrack was unauthorized and as this is full of mostly Black music… but all that’s settled for the time being.
Ostensibly this is about a random Black man dealing with insomnia and malaise as he has a slaughterhouse job in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and he struggles with being the head of a family w/ young children… in actuality, this is a slice-of-life where a wide variety of characters (including more than a few kids) are shown living in Watts and their experiences living in a poor area, whether good or-typically-bad. The cast is mainly non-actors this was mostly filmed between ’72 and ’73. Best of all, director Charles Burnett presented this movie as his Master of Fine Art thesis for the School of Film at UCLA in 1977. It is wild that Burnett made the bold choice to adopt this style for a student film involving Black talent in the early 70’s.
For a dumb white guy like me who wasn’t even alive in the 1970’s, this black-and-white film (which yes, does evoke feelings of Italian neo-realism) was quite illuminating. There isn’t too much else that I’d wish to reveal-people should experience this journey themselves if the premise sounds intriguing. For a movie filled with amateurs and helmed by a neophyte filmmaker, it has some great cinematography; the hip-hop community noticed it, given that Mos Def took an image from the film & gave it a red tint for his The Ecstatic album, along with The Roots using an aesthetic from the film for their Undun album.
The new 4K restoration made this 16mm movie look outstanding-for that reason alone, I can’t be too upset it took this long to finally tackle Killer of Sheep.
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