(ABP) — With Spidey swinging across one screen and pirate Jack Sparrow swaggering across another, moviegoers searching for substance this summer have another option. Into the box-office bluster comes Killer of Sheep, a gentle — and thoughtfully moral — look at life in the troubled Watts section of Los Angeles three decades ago.
Directed by Charles Burnett, the movie focuses on one African-American family a few years after the infamous 1965 Watts riots. Burnett completed the movie in 1977 as his UCLA film school thesis, but problems with music rights prevented the film from theater releases until now.
In contrast to the contrived fictional situations of a standard Hollywood narrative, Killer of Sheep offers a “slice of life” — a term associated with the neo-realism movement born after World War II when moviemakers left the studio for real-world commentary.
In the movie, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the family breadwinner, works at a slaughterhouse. The film's black-and-white, documentary-like scenes portray the ugliness of his work — meat packers in hardhats flay carcasses on meat hooks in rhythm to the blues of the movie's soundtrack.
In contrast with these moments, other scenes tenderly and humorously capture home and neighborhood life. Stan's little girl listens to a long-play album spinning precariously on a toy record player, singing along as she plays with dolls. Boys battle each other with rocks and make-do shields in the dust of a vacant lot or crawl one by one through a wall to pelt a nearby clothesline with dirt.
The dead-end packinghouse job that drains Stan and pays a survival wage leaves little energy for intimacy. As Stan dances cheek-to-cheek with his wife (Kaycee Moore) in the living room, the soulful lyrics of singer Dinah Washington echo his frustration: “This bitter earth/Well, what fruit it bears/What good is love/That no one shares?”
Despite the hardships, Stan steadfastly refuses the temptation to fill his pockets at the expense of his soul. Integrity and joy mix with life's wear and tear. The couple shares a close moment toward the end of the movie, but Stan's wife reminds him, “It's gonna rain. The roof still needs fixin'.”
Burnett said Stan survives on the strength of his moral character.
“He has a moral compass. He knows right from wrong,” he said in a question-and-answer session following a recent screening of the film.
The family man in Burnett's film “doesn't let these other … negative things come into his life and affect him,” the director later told Associated Baptist Press. “He hasn't quite reached the stage of Job” or the point of “enduring more than what he can bear.”
The director linked Stan's sense of morality to his Southern upbringing, calling attention to a moment in the film when Stan chides his son for using language sounding too “country.” Burnett sees Stan as trying to distance himself from his Southern background and in so doing “losing some important values.”
Art mimics life in the film, because Stan's Southern roots mirror Burnett's. Born in Vicksburg, Miss., Burnett moved to Los Angeles as a child, later considered working as an electrician, and then eventually studied film at UCLA. Burnett was baptized at a young age while visiting relatives back in Mississippi, where his uncle was a Baptist pastor and still preaches. The faith of his childhood is still a part of his life, Burnett said.
Other films by Burnett echo his faith roots. In his 1983 My Brother's Wedding, the main character's life is spared when he stays home to read the Bible to his grandparents instead of joining a friend who dies in an accident. In the 1990 To Sleep with Anger, traditional “folkways” conflict with orthodox Christian teaching, Burnett said.
Killer of Sheep, which Burnett made for under $10,000, contrasts not only today's big-budget blockbusters but the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s.
Those movies show the underside of life, portraying “sort of an individualistic, materialistic ethos, as typified by the pimps and the drug-pushers and the call girls and the shysters in the street” said Frank Dobson, director of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University. Dobson conducted the discussion session at the Nashville screening of Killer of Sheep.
While individualism was one way to respond to the desperation of the black experience, Dobson said, Burnett offers another.
People like Stan are “struggling to keep the home and the family intact, as opposed to the blaxploitation film, which suggests that the way to counter and to deal with the racism is through materialism,” Dobson said.
“I'm touched by the way in which these people are trying to, as we say in the black church, make a way out of no way,” Dobson said. “They're faced by … this landscape of desperation and poverty and despair, and what they do every morning is, they get up and they do what they need to do to keep on keeping on, which I think is all about faith.”
Killer of Sheep is playing on limited screens this summer, with release on DVD scheduled for fall.
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