Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" might be the best-reviewed movie of 2007. That's not bad for a 1977 film that, according to its maker, was never intended to be seen by a paying public. In a sense, it took Burnett 30 years not to get his wish. The movie languished without a distributor and thrived as this mythic landmark seen by virtually no one - until recently, when Milestone Film & Video helped get the movie shown in a handful of US theaters and released last month on video.
The film was originally Burnett's UCLA thesis project. He shot it in black and white on 16mm film when he was 33. His setting was Watts, in south Los Angeles. The story revolved, in part, around a vividly glum slaughterhouse worker named Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), his family, and their neighborhood. There is no rage or thunder, just a kind of exalted discretion. The camera watches life as it is lived.
If times are hard here (and trust me, they are), they don't yield a hard-time movie. The characters don't like being poor any more than you like to watch their poverty. But the reason the film has cast such a long shadow over all these years is Burnett's artistry. This is partial Italian neo-realism combined with the stark felicities of Jean Renoir and the austerity of Robert Bresson. Of course, it's nothing like those directors' movies either. It's unlike anything else. "Killer of Sheep" alters urban atmosphere just enough for images of the surreal to seep into the realism. For a few scenes, Stan's daughter wears a rubber droopy-dog mask. The cars don't drive. And an ice-cream jingle doesn't promise ice cream; it doesn't even promise an ice-cream truck. It's phantom music - and it happens to go nicely with the Sarah Vaughan, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rachmaninoff, Louis Armstrong, and Paul Robeson elsewhere on the soundtrack.
The movies hadn't seen African-Americans like this before: unromanticized, unsentimentalized, lovelorn, hardworking, hardly working, fanciful, agitated, exceptionally unexceptional, achingly human. Of course, 30 years later the movies still don't recognize poor black people (they don't often recognize the poor at all).
But "Killer of Sheep" presents people the movies haven't found. Wasn't that the guilty Beltway shock after Hurricane Katrina? We didn't know these people were there. (The rapturous critical response to the movie last spring has led the professionally combative critic Armond White, in the DVD's liner notes, to accuse the film's enthusiasts of "do-gooder condescension.") Obviously, Burnett's movie is pre-Katrina yet post-Watts riots, post-"Raisin in the Sun," post-"I'm Black and I'm Proud," post-Black Power, post-jive, and anti-pity, anti-empty uplift, anti-blaxploitation. It unfolds in a limbo of urban progress and upward mobility. Nothing works. The escalator to the cabin in the sky seems busted. The kids in this movie hurl rocks at a train that passes them by. Then they throw rocks at each other, and all the world's chaos is collapsed into their horseplay.
This re-release caps, in reverse, one of the great careers in American regionalism. Burnett's movies trace the evolution of south Los Angeles from ruins to socio-economic rejuvenation to a place openly sick with police racism, in 1994's preposterously entertaining legal thriller, "The Glass Shield." Burnett's biggest film before the resurrection of "Killer of Sheep" was "To Sleep With Anger," the rare film about how class strains divide an African-American family. Danny Glover played the weasely visitor who exploits those tensions. Burnett plied his drama with symbols and dark magic realism. And in getting the best role he'd had, Glover, however incidentally, garnered Burnett the most attention one of his movies had ever received.
"Killer of Sheep" is part of what Milestone, for the DVD, is calling "The Charles Burnett Collection," since there are four short films (including a recent one about a post-Katrina family). The other disc contains both versions of Burnett's color second feature, "My Brother's Wedding" (1983), another family portrait framed in south Los Angeles. This one lacks the haunted character of Burnett's debut; the shorter version of "My Brother's Wedding" was actually a rush job to get it in shape for festivals.
The director's official version, almost 30 minutes longer, is a much more persuasive piece of filmmaking, thoroughly steeped in the realities of its transitioning neighborhood. It makes a nifty companion to "Killer of Sheep." What is so eloquently subdued about class in the first movie is chafing and explicit in the second one. "My Brother's Wedding" prefigures "To Sleep With Anger": It's about the class struggle.
Pierce (Everett Silas) works in his parents' dry cleaning shop but doesn't appear to be up to much else. Meanwhile, his lawyer brother (Dennis Kemper) is about to marry a haughty woman. Against his better judgment, Pierce agrees to be in the wedding. This sounds like the setup for comic melodrama. But like each of the movies Burnett has written and directed about Los Angeles, it's resoundingly panoramic. A deceptively simple story about a family becomes a way of seeing the overlay of an entire neighborhood - its residents, its dysfunctions, its everyday events. Burnett's rational sense of perception etches a human face on an unwieldy street map. He gets what many great filmmakers understand about place. In order to understand characters, you first have to understand where they live.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
