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August 6, 1965. The government lays one more brick in the foundation of its imagined Great Society. Great men of Washington and of the civil-rights movement surround President Lyndon B. Johnson as he signs into law the Voting Rights Act. Johnson, elevated to office by chaos forces—insanity and murder—seeks to finally be accepted not as the understudy but as the ramrod patrician who can set the nation righter than before. A dignified and enfranchised life for all—that is the promise, and this time it will extend to the Negro, the man at the margins, he whom the President will lead by the hand into the abundance and comforts of the twentieth century. And yet a disruption to this dream of liberal order comes just five days after the signing ceremony: an uprising on the opposite coast, in the Black enclave of Watts.
Los Angeles had annexed Watts, an independent town, in 1926. What the metropolis brought into its sprawl was two square miles of former Mexican cattle-ranching territory, recently modernized by the rail. With the rail came the populations that the age of industry needed to secure its spoils: the Japanese, the poor whites, and, eventually, around the nineteen-forties, the Blacks. In the wave that would later be known as the Second Great Migration, thousands left the Jim Crow states of the South to head not just “up North,” following predecessors in the first part of the century, but “out West,” twin outposts of an almost terra nova, a new world. Those who travelled to Los Angeles tended to arrive at the sort of unofficial port of entry, which was Watts, or, rather, the slice of Watts that they were initially apportioned: the blocks south of 103rd Street and Central Avenue, nicknamed Mudtown. A Black man, supporting himself and his family in any of the number of war factories that had sprung up in the environs, could save up and get himself a house in Watts. It would not be a big house, and blockbusting speculators would upsell him—“This Lonesome Town,” a New York City vaudeville satirizing the property greed of California, named its fictional boomtown Watts—but it would be flanked by shrubs, announced with a lawn, protected, possibly, by a fence, and it would be his.
This lonesome town. Who found it lonesome? By the sixties, more than three hundred thousand people constituted Black Los Angeles, as compared with just sixty thousand some twenty years earlier. And that burgeoning population, menaced by poverty and the police, felt the city’s malignance. Watts—because of its isolation from what was considered Los Angeles proper, and because of its incipient and then established working-class Blackness—was especially neglected and abused. On August 11, 1965, Los Angeles police stopped Marquette and Ronald Frye, two brothers, under the suspicion of drunk driving. Marquette resisted being shackled. The police escalated the stop, calling in a swarm of backup officers. Rena Frye, their mother, rushed to the defense of her sons; the police pinned her to a patrol vehicle, and the officers took a baton to Marquette. Incensed neighbors poured into the intersection. The confrontation that swelled around them, amounting to tens of thousands of people, lasted for six days. The National Guard descended on South Central. Thirty-four people were killed. The upheaval left Martin Luther King, Jr., who had stood alongside Johnson at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, feeling shaken. He visited Watts but was somewhat rebuked by the people, too. “Civil-rights organizations have failed,” James Farmer, then the director of the Congress of Racial Equality, said in the aftermath of the riots, because “no one had any roots in the ghetto.”
Charles Burnett, a Great Migration baby, who was twenty-one at the time of the uprising, avoided the rioting. He watched as the National Guard stood sentinel outside his window. It wasn’t a sense of remove or superiority that made Burnett stay away. A student at the University of California, Los Angeles, he travelled between home and school, a distance of just a few miles that showcased the contradictions of Los Angeles. Studying writing and film, he found himself in line with the intellectual vogue: he was a radical, a New Negro; he was against the war in Vietnam and the violence wrought on his people at home. But he also understood that his mode of emotional expression would have to differ from that of the young men in Watts whom he knew and loved, the men who did not come to university but who reminded Los Angeles of their humanity anyway.
Burnett watched Watts become Watts, not his home but an event, in the national view. This event—having served as an accelerant for the sixties, sacrificing itself, as Malcolm and King would “sacrifice” themselves, for the cause of deeper change—was soon declared over, with Watts left behind in blight, becoming once again a “forgotten slum,” as Carey McWilliams, the editor of The Nation, had predicted it would in an editorial, published on August 12, 1965.
Burnett was also watching films. A kind of salon had formed among him and his peers at U.C.L.A., “like the French,” he told me. Decades later, these artists would get the codifying treatment: the scholar Clyde Taylor christened the loose collective “the L.A. Rebellion.” The Rebellion artists thought the rhythm of life was absent from cinema, which privileged, at that moment in film history, stereotype and fantasy. Burnett and his peers wanted to make movies, but they did not want to contort themselves to satisfy commercial Hollywood values. They wanted to answer to nothing else than the high ideals of art-making, which, to them, did not seem so high or so ideal. Indeed, the primary subject of their films would be the ordinary, working person. They looked to Europe, to Japan, to West Africa, to East and South Asia. If Ousmane Sembène could make “Black Girl,” if Satyajit Ray could make “Pather Panchali,” if Roberto Rossellini could make “Paisan,” then why couldn’t realism come to Black America?
In the early seventies, Burnett was developing in his mind a story that was not a story. Plot frustrated him. The demand for resolution, which for the Black character in Hollywood cinema meant either one of two things—noble spiritual cleansing or triumph over whitey—overlooked the day-in, day-out realities of ordinary people. A social realist, Burnett found the ultimate principle of moviemaking, which is the creation of drama, in the mundane. He did not want to make everyday people saints, as was the post-civil-rights-movement impulse. He wanted to portray Blackness as a mystery, recognizable but unquantifiable even to the people themselves. And although he is a storyteller, he wanted to show us who we were through images of granular detail: a boy drowning his corn cereal in sugar; more boys coming together to roughhouse on an empty railroad track; a man, his jeans riding low, laying linoleum under his sink; the wife of the man clinging to his hips, which are so clenched from working to provide, urging him to remember his other purpose.
These are the images—images of play, love, and melancholy—that accumulate in his début feature, the black-and-white film “Killer of Sheep,” which Burnett wrote, shot, and directed. A masterpiece of impressionism, “Killer of Sheep” is set in Watts and greater South Central L.A., years after that sleepless August. No nostalgic word of the uprising passes on anyone’s lips, but there are signs. Stan (Henry Sanders), our depleted hero, works at the local abattoir. Sequences of compliant sheep, moving to their mechanized slaughter, sometimes cut to scenes of streetwise children, repurposing rubble for games. The atmosphere is beguiling, because all these signs do not quite equate to a feeling, or diagnosis, of danger. The camera, a fly, roves, ending up in corners, lodging itself amid scenes of card-playing, seductions, wisecracking, and listlessness. Nothing happens; everything happens. The real Watts plays Watts. A majority of nonprofessional actors, including Burnett’s young niece, fills out the cast. The visual language is nimble, sometimes furtive and obscuring, and then classical and dramatic, recalling the photography of Robert Frank or Roy DeCarava.
The light disorientation of watching “Killer of Sheep” stems from its aching aesthetic beauty and also its plotlessness. Consider the Youngers, of “A Raisin in the Sun,” the archetypal Black family of the postwar period, who strive and strive. Whether the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, intended the reading or not, the 1959 play is an icon of the pervasive and flattening ideal of Black uplift. In “Killer of Sheep,” we never know where Stan will “go.” “I wanted the texture to be rough,” Burnett once said, “as if the movie had been made by someone who didn’t know how to make movies.” Being that his medium was film, and that his subject of interest was the post-migration city, Burnett was working in what was, relative to the theatre and the novel, new territory. But he used music, everything from the ragtime ballets of Scott Joplin and the canticles of Paul Robeson to the aural sex of Earth, Wind, and Fire, to bring a sense of idiom and familiarity to his experimentations: the latest player, picking up where his predecessors dropped off.
“Killer of Sheep,” the most known of the Rebellion films, had its first public screening in 1978, at the Whitney Museum. The rare negative review was the first, published in the Times. The critic Janet Maslin dismissed its “arty detachment,” its lack of eventfulness. One gets the sense that Maslin felt she was doing right by the Hollywood Blacks, who were often praised by liberal whites as a tribe of born artists who entertain while they preach. Implicit in the review is a kind of confusion. Why wasn’t the philistine film “acting” Black? Maslin’s review did not taint the film’s over-all reception, though. As the film critic Michael Tolkin wrote, “If Killer of Sheep were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized.” Burnett did not make the film with the intention of a wide release—one obstacle was the music rights, which he never secured, and was unable to afford. But in the ensuing half century the film has become something like a reliquary: outside of festivals and limited showings, few have been able to see it, and yet, as one critic has written, its images reside in our “collective subconscious.” A majority of critics and historians enshrine it, study it, as the jewel of American neorealism.
Twice, the movie, originally shot in 16-mm., has been restored; the first time, in the early two-thousands, the film was rescued from disintegrating into vinegar. (The restored film also came to theatres, in 2007, after the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh provided money for the music rights.) The latest restoration, done by U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, Milestone Films, and the Criterion Collection, and distributed by Kino Lorber, is in digital. The film is entering the Criterion Collection, making it the most accessible it has ever been. The revival requires Burnett to tour the cultural capitals, and to talk about the film and therefore his life in situ, as if life did not present its trials after. Burnett, throughout his fifty-year career, has made many other features (“My Brother’s Wedding,” “To Sleep with Anger,” “The Glass Shield”), along with documentaries (“Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,” “The Blues: Warming by the Devil’s Fire”), shorts (“The Horse,” “When It Rains”), and some gun-for-hire television gigs (“The Wedding,” for Oprah). He is lauded, but typically as a pioneer. The hallowed kind: ahead of his time, long-suffering, an independent defying the Hollywood behemoth next door. This is a delicate situation. In 1997, he said of his artistic plight—a little sad, a little funny, like his sui-generis films—“I never really call myself a filmmaker, because of the fact that it’s so infrequent that I do it.”
The director Charles Burnett.
The house west of Crenshaw Boulevard, in Los Angeles, is maize-colored. Arabesques on the wrought-iron screen door echo the vines in the back yard. Some years, the vines grow grapes. When I visited, the vines had not yet borne fruit; it wasn’t their season. Burnett bought the property in 1986. He has lived there ever since.
We sat in the living room. I faced a glass cabinet, which was stacked with framed photographs of Burnett, his wife, his two sons, and his granddaughters. One of the latter has stolen his eyes, two big brown bowls. The leather of her grandfather’s face is soft. According to the photographs, as sometimes happens, age has lightened his skin. Burnett sat facing the street. He wore running sneakers, joggers, and a baseball cap, a variation on the outfit I saw him wearing, a month prior, to introduce “The Annihilation of Fish”—his oddball, interracial romantic comedy from 1999, starring James Earl Jones as Obediah (Fish) Johnson and Lynn Redgrave as Poinsettia, that has also experienced a cycle of forgottenness and resuscitation. Burnett has an associative, loping way of holding conversation. A question—as in, Who did you cast to play the frightened child in your 1973 short film “The Horse”?—he takes as a suggestion. You end up contemplating Steinbeck and the politics of the Salinas Valley, before learning that he cast his brother’s girlfriend’s son.
An hour or so into our visit, the iron door flew open. Burnett startled and then settled back into his chair, understanding the source of the noise. “Well,” he said, “we really needed the wind.” Some Angelenos use this “we,” joining natural phenomena and residents as a conflicted one, and being an Angeleno forms the political and aesthetic core of Burnett’s work. Five features, his unofficial Los Angeles cycle, made in the course of twenty-five years, explore the spiritual and material effects of class striving and family maintenance in the transplant city. “There are mountains that circle like a horseshoe, and they block everything from escaping,” he told me, of the surrounding landscape. “You get that haze. The wind scatters it.”
Adjacent to the living room is his office. He turned to me, genuinely worried, asking, “Do you really want to go in there?” The room spilled deliciously over with books. A short hallway, leading to the back rooms, ended in the surprise of a flamingo-pink wall, on which hung a full-length photograph of Burnett’s grandmother. She sits on an oval wicker chair, legs crossed, her eyes staring at us from underneath her sun hat’s brim. “Oh, yeah,” Burnett said, “Fannie McQueen.”
The Deep South matriarch more or less raised Burnett and his brother. Burnett’s father—“a military man,” as Burnett described him, by way, I think, of euphemism—had been the first to leave Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Burnett had been born and where the family had its roots, for L.A. Then followed Burnett’s mother, her two toddlers in tow, and McQueen. Burnett’s mother, a housewife in Vicksburg, worked as a nurse’s aide, in L.A. His parents separated; for the duration of Burnett’s life, a hundred words or fewer passed between him and his father. In the woman-ruled house, an intergenerational conflict played out. Grandmother Fannie knew church and she knew the Delta, its fervent Christianity. A preacher from McQueen’s old church in Vicksburg had moved to Los Angeles with her. Her daughter, Burnett’s mother, who imprinted a love for women’s pictures—Tallulah Bankhead was her star—onto her son, had developed a hatred for Vicksburg and all it stood for. Fannie encouraged visits to the Old Country. When Burnett was eleven or twelve, he was delivered to the Mississippi River for a baptism. A boy in the fifties and sixties experienced Watts as a self-contained Black community; in Vicksburg, the once Confederate port, Blacks and whites were in dependent and troubled proximity. It isn’t difficult to imagine little Charles coming to the Delta region and sensing the force of its contradictions: it housed the river that saved you; it invented the music that corrupted you, the blues. Some who had left the South felt embarrassed by the emotional nakedness of the blues, all that yearning, and dismissed it as a backwards art. But the blues certainly made its way to Los Angeles, whether the people wanted it to or not. Burnett’s California films are blues films not merely because of their musical soundtracking but because of how they take up the rural art’s themes of being overworked and underloved. When Burnett made what is arguably his most autobiographical film, “Warming by the Devil’s Fire,” from 2003, a surreal documentary about the bluesmen and blueswomen of the Mississippi Delta, he was returning again.
Burnett described his community in Watts. “Everyone was from the South,” he said. His neighbors were bricklayers, rail workers, mechanics; a couple were doctors. Some summers, Burnett shadowed a friend’s step father, a plasterer. “There was a man named Bland,” he said, “who had big arms with veins like ropes—I always wanted big veins—and big hands. I remember Bland keeping the cement mixer going, and I’d try to mix. . . . Forget it.” In interviews, Burnett’s recollections are more pictorial than psychological. He does not make the expected analytical leap, linking his interest in Bland to the paternal absence in his life. He remembers people as collections of details and distinctive habits—as characters. When talking about himself, he often returns to his difference. During his adolescence, the sensibility among the youth was to turn away from the gentility of the race man and toward the existential and the militant. Burnett was neither. He tried and failed to put on weight, even as he gorged on mashed potatoes and malted milks until he needed to vomit. Besides being thin, Burnett was mild-mannered and quiet; he hid a stutter. He collected prize pigeons. His family raised chickens, rabbits, and turkeys. Depending on the weather, Devil’s Dip, a hollowed-out oil field, served as either a steep biking ramp or a pool. “We’d go swimming in there, like idiots,” he said. The memories of Watts before 1965 that surface for him these days are rural, and freighted with ambivalence—memories of a time when Southernness, or the platitudinal idea of Southernness, started to fall out of style.
The presence of children, in Burnett’s films, which are always about family, convey competing ideas: progress and the future, innocence and secret intelligence. In “Killer of Sheep,” Stan’s son asks his mother for some change to pay for a treat. Stan, beleaguered after work, comes alive when he reprimands his son for addressing his wife, played by the enigmatic and extraordinary Kaycee Moore, as “Muhdear.” Why is Stan busting his ass, elbow-deep in sinew, endangering his pride, to advance the prospects of his family all for his son to come up in here “acting country”? The film is a poem, its images made up of slumped torsos, of sidelong glances—and so the rectitude strikes us. The scene of Stan’s eruption mirrors the film’s opening—when, out of blackness, a nothingness, the face of a boy emerges, his eyes sunk in fear. A voice, the voice of a father, berates him. The boy (eventually revealed to be Stan) has not been his brother’s keeper. “If anything was to happen to me or your mother, you ain’t got nobody except your brother,” his father says. His mother materializes, too, to slap him. The scene is a memory; Burnett returns again and again to the conflicts of the Great Migration psyche, how it is passed down through the generations. In “To Sleep With Anger,” from 1990, Danny Glover, acting shockingly against type, plays Harry, a kind of Deep South devil who one day comes to a middle-class family living in South Central. Trickster Harry, carrying cards and folklore, slowly tears up the genteel home—in Burnett’s films, the home and its social rooms, meaning the kitchen and the living room, provide the stage—awakening the dormant tensions between mother (Mary Alice), father (Paul Butler), and their two sons, Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), who likes Harry’s roguishness, and Junior (Carl Lumbly), who sees his evil. All this while grinning madly, the cat who got the cream.
Initially, Burnett steered, like his peers, to vocational work, thinking he would have a steady “Southern” job, like an electrician. It wasn’t foolproof, but one way to secure a draft deferment was to go to school, and Burnett was not going to go to Vietnam. He recalled to me, lamenting, a sort of sanctioned disappearance of the young men in Watts, disappeared to war, disappeared to prison. “So many kids died so many different ways. I didn’t think I was going to be twenty-one. And then I got to be twenty-one, and I looked around. Now what do I do?”
There was a brief dalliance with photojournalism. The aesthetics of the documentary arts appealed to him. But the camera could turn you cold: he recalled to me an episode where he was photographing a person who had recently overdosed and died on the street. The subject of his photo was the dead man’s splayed legs. A woman, someone he had noticed in the neighborhood, stopped to ask him what he was doing. Unthinkingly, Burnett responded along the lines of “Nothing, I’m just having fun.” Remembering this, Burnett shakes his head, embarrassed. He feels more acutely than typical film artists the extractive nature of his work.
At U.C.L.A., a childhood interest in film sharpened. He got a job at a library near a movie theatre that he frequented almost compulsively. In the late sixties, academia answered to the demands of radical social movements, in part, through the establishing of an ethnic studies program, which attracted nonwhite students. In the U.C.L.A. film community, a cohort—drawn to one another because of their otherness—staked out a sort of laboratory for reimagining film. Larry Clark, Jamaa Fanaka, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, Thomas Penick, Julie Dash, and Burnett, who passed through the university at different times, all shared a vision for an independent cinema—a Third World cinema produced in the First World, as documented in the essay compendium, “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema.” Burnett and his fellow-Rebellion artists scrapped together a casual infrastructure; they shared equipment and worked on one another’s films. They would meet up at El Coyote, the local Mexican spot, to talk for hours. Michael Roemer’s “Nothing but a Man,” gave the artists a sense of “possibility,” Burnett remembers. “We were rebelling without knowing the legacy we would leave.” They argued over blaxploitation—a portmanteau pejorative created by Junius Griffin, the president of the Hollywood branch of the N.A.A.C.P. Were these get-whitey films, a great deal of which were written, directed, and produced by Black people, admirably gaming Hollywood? Or were they demeaning—perversions of Black Power militancy?
One of Burnett’s earliest cinematographic efforts is the silent short “69 Pickup,” written and directed by Penick. Two Black men pick up a white woman hitchhiking on the boulevard. They lure her back to her apartment, and rape her. The film is all skin and id, meaner than any “Shaft” film, for the obvious reason, and because it evinced a politics. The possibility or impossibility of interracial sex occupied the Black male intellectual: this was the province of Baldwin and Ellison; this was the risk of Sidney Poitier. “69 Pickup,” a minor work, to be clear, is important to see, as a kind of purging, and as an interesting and askance look at early Burnett. Here, his style, a kind of manufacturing of verité, focussed on bodies, is already apparent, a patina hovering above the horrible action, waiting to be put to better use. And Burnett would never darken his style like that again; his following work, the short “Several Friends,” which he wrote, directed, and shot, is about, as the title suggests, the digressions of adult friendship; it would lead to “Killer of Sheep.”
A precursor figure to the Rebellion movement is Oscar Micheaux, the Black writer and director who worked outside the studio system in the thirties, making race pictures—movies, in which all the actors were Black, intended to counter stereotypes. But Burnett, interestingly, had not seen any Micheaux until after “Killer of Sheep.” There is a kind of historical parallel: Black artists across film, photography, and theatre have been influenced by “Killer of Sheep” in this past half century without having exactly seen it. How many listeners of Mos Def’s “The Ecstatic” knew that the record’s cover, a still of the boy in seeming flight, comes from Burnett, as do the interludes? The work almost emanates rays; any psyche can be impacted, indirectly or directly.
The first press notes for “Killer of Sheep” memorably report the filming taking place in five or six weekends, when his actors were off work, over the course of a year. Most of the nonprofessional adult actors Burnett paid with gratitude or with beer. Some scenes, like the Chaplinesque sequence of Stan and a friend securing a car engine onto the bed of a pickup truck only for the engine to roll off as they depart, are restaged from Burnett’s life. The cut to the next scene is of young boys, whom we have seen play by the rail, leaping across buildings: not thinking about peril, they are airborne, while the adults are weighed down, chained to the road below, as noted by the filmmaker Barry Jenkins, an admirer of Burnett.
Julie Dash, the director of “Daughters of the Dust,” and an assistant director on one of Burnett’s later films, said something unforgettable about her collaborator’s best-known work: “The first time I saw ‘Killer of Sheep,’ . . . I just assumed a woman made it, because it is so tender.” Burnett sometimes begins his films with the man—his face framed tight, engulfed by fear or flame. In a medium shot comes the woman. Burnett did not name the character played by Kaycee Moore in his script for “Killer of Sheep,” but the goal was not obfuscation. Burnett’s women vibrate with inner life, a portion of which they protect from the men they love. Moore is the heart of the film. She has no relation to the Jezebel nor to the Mammy; she is a flesh-and-blood person with her own appetites and desires. Moore, the actress, does bear, I think, a coincidental resemblance to Cicely Tyson, the persevering heroine not only of the 1972 Black family film “Sounder” but of the seventies itself, with her bold and brave refusals to play stereotypes. For any actress to convey erotic life risked oversexualization, but not doing so denied a sort of humanity, a humanity that Moore, swaying with her husband to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” loses herself in.
The Fipresci Prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival went to “Killer of Sheep.” The film brought Burnett to Europe. “When we went there,” he said, “we felt the twenties coming back,” referring to the Harlem Renaissance. The Black American artist, heralded abroad, fighting for resources on our shores, experiences a real vertigo. “In some ways,” Burnett once said, the international acclaim “made it worse. People think I’m an artist. They may not consider me for a job.”
Following the festival win, the Germans gave Burnett a financing grant for his second feature, which included equipment and a budget of around eighty thousand U.S. dollars. His next film, “My Brother’s Wedding,” which he shot in 1983, is like the photonegative of “Killer of Sheep.” The top tone is comedy, the undercurrent tragedy. “It is more didactic,” he once said. If the oral storyteller created “Killer of Sheep,” then “My Brother’s Wedding” was made by the satirist. The action, backgrounded by Johnny Ace’s lovestruck crooning, returns to South Central Los Angeles. Working in the wedding-and-a-funeral formula, Burnett spins a comic-tragic yarn about Pierce (Everett Silas), a kind of blinkered fool, who works at his parent’s dry cleaners. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, as the source of his pride comes from rejecting the striver’s gospel. He is loyal to South Central, even as he’s run down. In one comic scene, a man with a gun tries to rob him. What is a gun doing in a Burnett film? The thing is, that gun jams; Burnett, a master of irony, thwarts our expectations. There is Chekhov, yes, but in American film the gun going off is ordained by the greater cults of marketable violence. When Burnett’s gun goes off, as it eventually does—unseen and unheard, in a scene which Burnett chooses not to depict—we are suddenly aware that we have been under his quiet control. Pierce has a brother, whom he loathes. At dinner, he picks fights with him and his fiancée, a lawyer, who Pierce believes embodies the individualist greed of the saditty Black upper class. It’s only Soldier (Ronnie Bell), Pierce’s friend who has returned from war, that Pierce idolizes, seeing him as a real Black man: brawny, cool, sexed. Bell, Burnett told me, was the son of the one man to receive the death penalty under Reagan. “My Brother’s Wedding” had it all: an explicit entertainment factor, the pathos of tragedy, a behind-the-scenes political story. Would the audiences of the neon eighties see it?
But what happened was this. Post-production had been difficult. The editor had suffered a mental-health crisis. One actor walked off before filming was completed. Burnett sent an unfinished cut to his producers. It isn’t uncommon to solicit feedback during post-production. What is uncommon is for producers to send that unfinished cut to festivals. One festival premièred the unfinished version in 1984. Maslin, again reviewing, in the Times, found a new issue with Burnett, calling his directing “rudimentary” and “stiff.” Any momentum, critical for the second-time filmmaker, especially the Black filmmaker, was killed.
The ostensible reason for my visit with Burnett was the latest restoration of “Killer of Sheep.” But our conversation, in the yellow house, tended to bookend “Killer,” drifting to the preceding Watts period and the subsequent arid years—the latter more recent in memory and more representative, frankly, of the mood of his full career. Following the disastrous treatment of “My Brother’s Wedding,” the fulcrum came into view: one Burnett receiving accolades and heroic acknowledgement in the press and the other struggling to finance, complete, and release his projects. In 1988, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius” grant. “I thought it was someone playing a joke,” he told the L.A. Times afterward. Adjectives appear and reappear in the stories about Burnett and his work: unsung, underseen, unknown.
This was the Burnett that gained a kind of cult fame, the filmmaker in middle age, treading purgatory. In 1990, coinciding with the festival première of “To Sleep with Anger”—his third feature, which did well at festivals but did not receive a proper wide release—the Black film and theatre critic Lisa Kennedy profiled Burnett in the Village Voice. She saw in him a salt-of-the-earth bard who belonged not to film but to literature: “The company Burnett keeps is not with his would-be peers—[Spike] Lee or the Hudlins [Reginald and Warrington] or the Wayans [Marlon and Shawn]—but with Toni Morrison or playwright August Wilson.” Kennedy, certainly receptive to pop culture, did not intend disparagement of Black Hollywood. She was identifying the literary introversion of Burnett’s work, its focus on interiority and subdued theatricality—exactly the style that was not on trend.
What makes a Black movie a Black movie? No one can agree. In the nineties and into the new millennium, one definition prevailed: the young Black male director made movies Black, by sheer force of his authority and public presence. Although women directors, such as Julie Dash, the first Black woman to release a feature film in the U.S., put out revolutionary work, the aspect of Black filmmaking that was emphasized, among movie buffs, was that of maleness. If the rapper could trounce the rocker in popularity, then surely the Black filmmaker could become the face of the American filmmaker, which had long been considered a white man’s job. In 1991, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about the “black director” boom, with the headline “They’ve Gotta Have Us.” (Spike Lee, in some ways, does not count, because he endures as a phenomenon unto himself.) The Hudlins, John Singleton, and Ernest Dickerson, among others, drew big, racially mixed crowds who wanted to feel seen (or punished) by tales of wounded masculinity and police menace in the hoods. These films, many of which focussed on the new generation of South Central Black youth, flipped white male film genres: they were Westerns, noirs, crime tales. And although they embraced melodrama and spectacle, they lived and died on contemporary statistics. “Menace II Society,” from 1993, directed by the Hughes brothers, opens with archival footage of the Watts riots, setting the scene for the inescapable cycle of resistance, infighting, and death. Singleton’s “Boyz n the Hood” begins with the title card: “One out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime.”
An opportunity came, in the nineties, for Burnett to join in on the brief prosperity. He was approached to direct the crime film “New Jack City.” He declined, and the project went to Mario Van Peebles; it netted nearly fifty million dollars. Burnett seems bored by the conventions of the revenge gangster plot, which took over Black film and music, in the nineties. But he is malleable: when he plays with so-called male genres, he chooses a cerebral approach. His one cop movie, “The Glass Shield,” a post-Rodney King film, makes the main police officer, Deputy J. J. Johnson (Michael Boatman), Black. Johnson is an idealist who, to the dismay of his Black family, thinks he can fix the racist corruption of the police department. The film, a psychological thriller, swallows action. As in “My Brother’s Wedding,” the guns fire offscreen; the opening is a comic-book picaresque of the typical shot-cop hero plot.
The suspect, the innocent accused, Teddy Woods, is played by Ice Cube. Born and raised in Compton, Ice Cube was, at the time, a new kind of crossover star: originally a member of the gangster-rap group N.W.A., a.k.a Niggas with Attitude, he had made his way into acting, a transition facilitated by Singleton, who cast him in “Boyz n the Hood.” In that film, Ice Cube is Doughboy, a gangbanger who loses first his brother and then his own life, both offerings in a fatalistic cycle of street vengeance. Woods, in “The Glass Shield,” is made small, a passive figure at the mercy of the courts. Burnett uses Cube and his pop cultural aura to put forth a critique, not only of the police but also, I think, of how Black artists take up and act out self-limiting myths.
No matter to Miramax, the film’s distributor, who demanded that Burnett increase Ice Cube’s screen time, which would have compromised the point. Burnett did not relent, and Miramax arguably buried the film, bungling its marketing. “You either have to settle with what you believe in,” Burnett said in a 2020 interview, “or continue fighting for what you want.”
Our soft-spoken pugilist found a complicated refuge in television. Burnett’s “Nightjohn,” based on the children’s book, about an enslaved girl who learns how to read, is a wonder on the order of “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.” He managed to make it with Disney. The sentimentality of the logline is undercut by Burnett’s dreamlike evocations of girlhood. “Nightjohn” is a critical work, too, because it marks the start of Burnett’s head-on explorations of history. He had, in his early career, primarily tuned himself to what was then the present. A number of his late-career films look back and, moreover, consider how history is created in the first place. “Warming by the Devil’s Fire,” a mix of fiction and documentary, was commissioned by PBS and premièred in 2003. He inserts archival footage of blues singers into an imagined personal narrative, loosely pulled from his childhood experience, of a grown man recalling the summer he went home, to the Mississippi Delta, for a baptism and, instead, experienced an initiation into the pained and pleasurable world of the blues. In “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,” released the same year, Burnett approaches one of America’s most unapproachable subjects, the justifications and the denunciations of Turner’s rebellion, using similar methods. He reënacts scenes from no less than six histories of Turner, addressing Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Styron, among others, and showing the impossibility of reaching an objective truth.
The Turner documentary breaks the fourth wall, as it ends, with Burnett coming into the frame. We see the set; we see Burnett direct the actors. “When you do a film about interpretation,” the talking-head Burnett contemplates, “isn’t that an interpretation?” Burnett, in the two-thousands, was self-reflective, testing his ability to tell big, major-key narratives. His early work, meanwhile—both the heralded and the lost—found champions for restoration. Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, the married couple behind Burnett’s distributor, Milestone, shepherded “Killer of Sheep” and “My Brother’s Wedding” out of obscurity, giving Burnett the opportunity to finish the “Wedding” edit, decades later. Critics wanted to make sure he got his due. Robert E. Kapsis, a leading scholar of Hitchcock, published an indelible compendium of Burnett’s interviews, dating back to the late eighties. In 2012, MOMA ran a retrospective, called “The Power to Endure.” Burnett went and introduced his films, an experience that was both joyous and painful. Of particular pain to him is watching Moore, who died recently, and who never made it as an actress. One of her last roles was in 1984’s “Bless Their Hearts,” which the critic Ashley Clark described as a spiritual successor to “Killer of Sheep,” directed by Billy Woodberry and written by Burnett. The fact that she did not star in more films is a travesty that Burnett once compared to Armstrong never owning a trumpet. “Every time you look at these films, there is something that makes you not enjoy it as you would if everyone were still alive,” he told me.
I asked Burnett about the hardware in the cabinet in his living room. In 2017, he was informed that he had been honored with the Governor’s Award. The director Agnès Varda was an honoree too—another outsider visionary. Burnett was nervous on the day he was to receive the award. It had been ten years since the première of the negatively reviewed docu-fiction “Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation,” starring Glover and Carl Lumbly, the last film that Burnett both wrote and directed; and eight years since the première of “Relative Stranger,” an unfortunate film he directed for Hallmark, starring Cicely Tyson. Some see such awards as a kind of placation, if not an insult. Unfinished or abandoned projects, at the time, and now, still bother Burnett. What good is late recognition if he cannot make the film he was dreaming up about Barack Obama’s mother, or the one about Robert Smalls, who escaped slavery by stealing a Confederate steamboat? Still, to Burnett, the award was also a recognition of all the films that he had, in fact, completed.
Not long after our California meeting, Burnett came to New York City. Twice in two weeks, he told me, hard on the body. The first trip was to attend the memorial of James Earl Jones, who died last year, taking the voice of god with him; it was held at the theatre on West Forty-eighth Street which now bears his name. In Jones’s post-Star Wars fame, in 1999, Burnett may have been the only director to think to thin out Jones’s baritone, asking the actor to convey fragility—as the Jamaican widower Obediah (Fish) Johnson, in “The Annihilation of Fish.”
The second trip was to screen “Killer of Sheep” at Film Forum. We had lunch, one afternoon, at the café at MOMA, where Burnett told me about his stay at a hotel in Times Square. In the middle of the night, a cleaner knocked on his door, offering him, inexplicably, towels. He never went back to sleep. His distributors took advantage of this second visit, throwing a birthday party for him at Posteritati, the film-poster boutique in SoHo. I saw Burnett wandering the room, politely accepting the reverential nods, eating cake and sipping from a can of La Croix. Amy Heller, of Milestone Films, embraced him. He put the slice of cake down. And then he went back to Los Angeles. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
