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Classics from the vault: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep
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“At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.” - Bruce Springsteen, 1982
Of all the precursors to the indie film movement of the 1980s, few have been as overlooked as Killer of Sheep. Shot by then-UCLA student Charles Burnett over several years with friends for a cast and crew, it was completed in 1977 but didn’t see the light of day commercially for thirty years due to music licensing issues, despite winning the Critics' Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival and being selected to the National Film Registry in 1990.
Unlike many “independent” films today that have multi-million dollar budgets and star performers, Killer of Sheep is a true indie film, made for under $10,000 with a bunch of unknowns. Shot on location in the Watts district of L.A., it’s the American cinema’s closest equivalent to the Italian neorealist movement of the 1940s, filmed in gritty 16 mm black-and-white with an episodic narrative, playing like a series of related urban short stories tied together by a compendium of 20th century African-American music, from Paul Robeson and Dinah Washington classics to the Chicago blues of Little Walter and the modern R&B of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Henry G. Sanders plays Stan, an average guy who works the graveyard shift at the local slaughterhouse. He has a wife and a couple kids; they get by, but just barely, living in a cramped home on his meager salary. In one heartbreaking scene, Stan and a buddy lug an automobile engine down a steep flight of stairs and load it into the back of a pickup, only to have it fall out as they pull away. The look on Stan’s face as he watches it break on the pavement is like a little boy whose ice cream cone has fallen in the dirt, his last few bucks of savings smashed to pieces like so many other dreams deferred.
The scenes in the slaughterhouse have a strange, almost Felliniesque dream-like quality. As the sheep are mechanically herded to their cruel fates, the metaphor is clear: Stan is a man who has been put through the meat grinder by life, and he can either give up or find something to keep living for.
Although Burnett provides no clear-cut resolutions, there’s one seemingly inconsequential moment early in the film that provides a small glimmer of hope. Seated at the kitchen table, drinking tea with a friend, Stan holds the teacup against his cheek and comments that it reminds him of the warmth of a woman’s caress while making love. His friend laughs it off as crazy talk and the moment passes, but what Burnett has captured is that indefinable thing that keeps people going in life. For Stan it’s a cup of tea and a woman’s touch, for others it may be a warm bath or their child’s laughter, but it’s that indispensable something in which people find some reason to believe.
Killer of Sheep airs Thursday, July 16 at 1:30 AM ET on Turner Classic Movies, and is also available in an excellent DVD box set which includes the Burnett films My Brother’s Wedding, The Horse, Several Friends, and When it Rains.
The trailer from the 2007 theatrical release of Killer of Sheep:
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