Review: ‘Killer of Sheep,' a poetic-realist masterwork, returns sharper than ever
Of all the memorable feature film debuts, Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep' may be the freest from contrivance, disinterested to a lovely degree in conventional story machinery or in anything more than moments in time and the daily lives of people Burnett knew in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Burnett himself, whose family relocated from Mississippi to LA, many of these people feel the pull of the place they knew, in this place they have come to know. That neither here-nor-there feeling is everywhere in 'Killer of Sheep.'
Burnett shot it on black-and-white 16mm film in the early 1970s, then released it in a very small way in 1978. The velvety 4K digital restoration of what began as Burnett's UCLA thesis project runs April 18-24 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It's 80 minutes of evanescent yet concretely specific beauty, from a great American artist.
There is a narrative framework, spacious enough to make the movie Burnett had in him. It co-stars the streets, vacant lots, alleys and interiors he knew well, captured a few years after the deadly Watts clash between citizens and police. The media of the time called it the Watts riots; the people closer to the bloodshed called it, and call it, the Watts rebellion. None of this is addressed directly in 'Killer of Sheep.' Yet in his traversing of the urban landscape here, often wordless, Burnett is paying attention to the past in every piece of the present.
The family at the core of the story consists of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), who works nights at the slaughterhouse indicated by the movie's title. It's a wearying job; his wife, played by Kaycee Moore, feels pushed to the margins of their increasingly distant life together. Moore, who died in 2021, was (like Burnett) a key member of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers movement. And in its poetic-realist eye for environment as well as character, 'Killer of Sheep' reminds us there's more than one way for artists to rebel.
The film spends time with this family's children and other kids, chasing freight trains; battling each other with sounds, fistfuls of parched dirt and busted plywood shields; and, in one of many casually perfect compositions, a ground-level view of three neighborhood kids leaping from building to building. Dropping in on this conversation or that confrontation, Burnett gathers some evidence of what's eroding this family's stability, much of it economic. At one point, Stan's offered the chance by a local fixture to make a little money as an accessory to a murder, which he declines. This life does not make things easy; Stan's struggles between paychecks weigh heavily, though the way this filmmaker makes films, the heaviness is conveyed with a magically light touch.
Burnett, now 81, went on to make some wonderful work with A-list actors: 'To Sleep With Anger,' 'Devil in a Blue Dress' and the recently recirculated 'The Annihilation of Fish' among them. In 'Killer of Sheep,' so much of his talent was right there, at the start, in the way the locations and compositions envelop the nonprofessional cast members without competing with them. Burnett has said he made his film partly as a corrective to the attempts of working-class 'gritty realism' his white, privileged fellow UCLA film school students were turning out in the 1970s.
For decades, 'Killer of Sheep' stayed nearly out of sight, tied up with some complicated and costly music-rights issues resolved only recently. Burnett's fantastic soundtrack selections, underscoring intimate moments and raucous ones, can now be heard in their best-yet audio quality and their fully legal glory. Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, Earth, Wind and Fire, George Gershwin, bluesman Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup — every choice makes sense, and adds a fuller dimension to these people's lives. The film ends not with an ending, really, but a humane acknowledgment of how much of life feels like a daily string of middles, pulling us along.
'Killer of Sheep' — 4 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some language)
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