Screenings: Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott writes, “One of the most heartening recent developments in the world of American film has been the revival of interest in the work of Charles Burnett.� Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1944, Burnett spent most of his childhood in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. To date, he has directed six theatrical features, four of which have been commercially released in the United States. He has directed several projects for television, including the Oprah Winfrey-financed miniseries The Wedding, based on the novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West, and three films on African American historical themes for the Disney Channel. (Burnett’s television debut, Nightjohn, was hailed by New Yorker film critic Terrence Rafferty as the “best American film of 1996.�) In addition, Burnett has helmed several unconventional documentaries for public television, including “Warming by the Devil‘s Fire� (screened at the 2003 Virginia Film Festival) from the PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues.
Burnett studied film at University of California at Los Angeles, among a group of future filmmakers that would later be known as the “LA school� — or, more pointedly, the “LA rebellion.� Rejecting the gloss of Hollywood cinema and the cliches of “blaxploitation“ that dominated African American filmmaking at the time, Burnett and film-school colleagues like Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry sought to create an unflinching portrait of the people and the communities they understood.
While at UCLA, Burnett shot his first feature, Killer of Sheep, working on weekends with a nonprofessional cast, and financing the film with grant money. Killer of Sheep was first screened at festivals in 1977, and although problems with music rights kept it from a commercial release until early 2007, its impressionistic view of family life in Watts has made it an underground independent classic. In 1990, Killer of Sheep was selected by the Library of Congress as one of the first fifty films on its National Film Registry.
Burnett’s later films, including the unreleased My Brother’s Wedding, the barely-released To Sleep With Anger, and the underrated police drama The Glass Shield, take place in the same south-central Los Angeles neighborhood, and possess a keen eye for significant details. Burnett also acted as writer and cinematographer on another acclaimed depiction of African American life in Los Angeles, Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts.
Among Burnett’s many honors over the years are the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren award, grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, a “genius grant� from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, and the Paul Robeson Award from Howard University.
