9 parts, read articles ask a question for each part, 1-5 sentence/part

An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse

Paula J. Massood

Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 4, October 1999, pp. 20-41 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided at 27 Nov 2019 18:58 GMT from Simon Fraser University

https://doi.org/10.1353/wan.2004.0004

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170731

20

Fig. 1. Stan in the slaughterhouse, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977). Video frame enlargement.

21WIDE ANGLE NO. 4 (OCTOBER 1999), pp. 20-41.V O L . 2 1 © OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FILM

An Aesthetic Appropriate to

Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism,

and the Documentary Impulse

by Paula J. Massood

SCOOTER: YOU CAN BE A MAN IF YOU CAN, STAN. —KILLER OF SHEEP (CHARLES BURNETT, 1977)

On August 11, 1965, violence broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles,

the result of an incident between officers from the LAPD and an African

American man named Marquette Frye. Faced with another instance of police

brutality, the predominantly black community rebelled against the police pres-

ence, the prevailing poverty, and the government disinterest that had long de-

fined and limited life in Southcentral Los Angeles. Watts burned over the

next six days as the nation and the world viewed televised coverage of the re-

bellion while hearing reports of rioters “run[ing] loose, looting, burning, and

rampaging.”1 Following the Watts rebellion, urban insurrections occurred

again in 1967 and 1968 in cities including Newark, Detroit, and Chicago. Un-

like earlier racially-motivated uprisings—from the teens or the forties, for ex-

ample—the urban rebellions from the sixties were nationally televised. They

acted as a warp in the United States’ racial repressed by bringing to the surface

Paula J. Massood is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Film Department at Brooklyn College/CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Temple University Press, 2003).

22

white America’s deeply-buried fears of African American aggression with foot-

age remarkably resembling Birth of a Nation’s(D. W. Griffith, 1915) infamous

images of Reconstruction-era looting and rampaging. For white suburbia

these images defined the black ghetto.2 The broadcasts served a different

purpose, however, for many African American spectators who saw resistance to

the specific wrongs, such as poverty, decay, and unchecked police brutality,

faced by residents of the inner city.3 In contrast to earlier problem picture de-

pictions of race relations that graced movie screens in the fifties and early six-

ties or news coverage of Civil Rights protests, the newscasts redefined the im-

ages of African Americans on screen for both blacks and whites.

By the end of the sixties, televisual images of inner city anger and despair

were supplemented by new representations of African American city space

introduced into mainstream cinematic discourse in the form of the short-lived,

though influential, blaxploitation, or black action, genre. Serving as the pre-

cursor to the genre, Melvin Van Peebles’ independent feature, Sweet Sweet--

back’s Baadasssss Song (1971), introduced many of blaxploitation’s conventions,

such as an empowered black masculinity, on-location shooting in recognizable

city spaces, and a sense of temporal immediacy aided by costume, dialogue,

and musical soundtrack. More “mainstream” blaxploitation vehicles, such as

Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), quickly appropriated these features into their nar-

ratives. Inspired by the financial success of Sweetback, the Shafts, Superflies,

and Dolemites that followed became box office hits, especially with an audi-

ence that was primarily (though not limited to) young, urban, African Ameri-

can men. At the same time however, their images, like Sweetback’s before them,

were highly contested, as both black and white critics opposed the films’ glori-

fication of criminal life. Soon, religious and political groups such as the Coali-

tion Against Blaxploitation (CAB) were demanding more “realistic” represen-

tations of black life in film, and the pressure exerted on the industry by these

groups (as well as an industrial shift towards blockbuster and crossover films)

resulted in the eventual disappearance of blaxploitation productions.

Emerging on the periphery of both Hollywood and blaxploitation was a group

of filmmakers working under the auspices of the film program in the Theater

Arts Department at UCLA. This group, variously referred to as the “L.A.

23

Rebellion” and the “L.A. School of Filmmakers,” was made up of African and

African American graduate film students and included Haile Gerima, Ntongela

Masilela, Larry Clark, Billy Woodberry, Alile Sharon Larkin, Julie Dash,

Zeinabu irene Davis, and Charles Burnett, among others. Unlike many of the

African American filmmakers working within the mainstream, members of the

L.A. School expressed an explicitly political agenda that extended beyond

profit-making and the superficial interrogation of representation; instead, they

were concerned with what they saw as the internal colonization of African

Americans and film’s role in the construction of subjectivity and self-respect.

To this end, they were interested in deconstructing Hollywood’s ideological

prisonhouse, “recoding black skin on screen and in the public realm by revising

the contexts and concepts with which it had long been associated.”4 Rather

than replicating Hollywood’s classical realism and linear narrative structure,

members of the L.A. School drew from a diverse cross-section of filmmaking

styles in order to formulate “an aesthetic … appropriate to [their] conditions.”5

They were concerned with finding a film form that was, according to Ntongela

Masilela, “unique to their historical situation and cultural experience, a form

that could not be appropriated by Hollywood.”6

Charles Burnett enrolled at UCLA in 1967 and was one of the “first wave”

members of the L.A. School. The films Burnett worked on while at UCLA,

especially his directorial debut, Killer of Sheep (1977), Haile Gerima’s Bush

Mama (1976) and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), provide us

with an interesting example of the intersecting influences coming to bear not

only on Burnett, but also on most of the filmmakers working within the Univer-

sity’s film program. Furthermore, they illustrate the way in which a filmmaker’s

political and cultural context can directly effect his or her aesthetic choices.

This fact resonates once we examine Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a film about a

family man (Stan) who works at a slaughterhouse during the day and who

spends sleepless nights, desensitized and distanced from everything surround-

ing him. The film combines both documentary and fictional filmmaking tech-

niques—products of the many political and aesthetic discourses that influenced

the L.A. School group—in an attempt to formulate an aesthetic that spoke to a

post-Civil Rights, post-Rebellion context. Killer of Sheep and other L.A. School

films are examples of situation-specific African American filmmaking: works

24

that are simultaneously positioned on the geographic and industrial margins of

Hollywood and which self-consciously reject the concerns and conceits of

blaxploitation.

In “The Los Angeles School of Filmmakers,” Masilela provides a first-hand

account of the groups’ diverse, yet interconnected, influences: The Black Arts

Movement and its concern with identifying a Black aesthetic; the revolution-

ary politics of the Black Panthers; the writings of Amilcar Cabral and Franz

Fanon on the effects and after-effects of colonization; Oscar Micheaux’s inde-

pendent filmmaking practices, reworked for a “working class milieu”; and the

revolutionary Third Cinemas emerging from Latin American and African

countries, particularly Cuban Cinema and Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo. Masilela

notes that “cinema from the Third World … was to have a lasting influence on

the Los Angeles school,” and even resulted in the formation of a Third World

Film Club, which screened many of the films emerging from Latin America

and Africa at that time.7 Many of the filmmakers associated with the L.A.

School adapted Third Cinema’s revolutionary and reflexive filmmaking tech-

niques, along with its proponents’ concern with the effects of internalized co-

lonialism, for an American context. Burnett and others were attempting to

free their audience “from the mental colonization that Hollywood tries to im-

pose on its audiences, black and white.”8

A similar rhetoric of revolution and resistance was echoed by Van Peebles with

Sweetback. He too had an interest in “de-colonizing” his audience’s minds.9

Sweetback’s mythic qualities, his virility, and his agency were Van Peebles’

attempt to rewrite Hollywood representations of a disempowered or tamed

black masculinity, the most recent being those linked with Sidney Poitier and

his roles in problem pictures like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer,

1967). Notwithstanding Sweetback’s experimental form, inspired by cinema

verité, the French New Wave, and Soviet filmmaking practices, members of

the L.A. School were not drawn to the film as a model because while “some of

Sweetback’s techniques and procedures were acceptable to the insurgents … its

politics were not.” Instead, films made by members of the L.A. School, espe-

cially those by Burnett and Gerima, focused on “family, women, history, and

folklore.”10 The concern with family, in particular, determines Killer of Sheep’s

25

narrative and helps define Burnett’s vision of black urban space, one that is,

unlike Sweetback, enabled by communities working together in various forms

rather than by individuals working alone.

Like many filmmakers working within the environment engendered by UCLA

at this time, Burnett’s particular version of what has been called’“Black urban

realism,” “poetic realism,” “subtle realism,” and” “neo-realism” has direct an-

tecedents in the political and aesthetic practices of Third Cinema. The politi-

cal impulse of many Third Cinema filmmakers was a desire to break with a

colonial past by rejecting dominant cinematic codes in favor of articulating a

film form that was appropriate to its own national context: Cuban, Brazilian,

Senegalese, for example. In formulating their aesthetics, filmmakers like Tomás

Gutíerrez Alea and Carlos Diegues looked to disparate cinematic forms and

national cinemas, such as Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism, and the French

New Wave, as models. Third Cinema filmmakers, especially those in Latin

America, also drew from the documentary filmmaking practices of John Grier-

son, the founder of the British documentary movement in the thirties.11 Brit-

ish social documentaries from this time presented a model of advocacy which

provided its subjects with a voice and a focus on matters that were important

to the working classes; a rubric first seen in Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton’s

Housing Problems (1935). Additionally, both Neorealism and British documen-

tary were models of low-budget filmmaking. They were “examples of an art-

isanal, relatively low-cost cinema working with a mixture of public and private

funds, enabling directors to work in a different way and on a different economic

scale from that required by Hollywood and its various national-industrial rivals.”12

While Killer of Sheep has been often associated with Neorealism, its debt to

documentary has been just as often overlooked. Yet Burnett possessed a first-

hand knowledge of Griersonian documentary principles through his associa-

tion with Basil Wright, one of the original members of Grierson’s film unit dur-

ing the thirties, and an instructor at UCLA while Burnett was enrolled in the

program. In fact, Wright is credited with persuading Burnett to pursue film in

the first place.13 Burnett himself notes that Wright was a mentor who provided

the initial impetus for his own filmmaking. According to Burnett, “before I

discovered Third World Cinema, Basil Wright’s [documentary] class started

26

things for me.”14 It wasn’t only Grierson’s and Wright’s low-budget approach to

filmmaking or their interest in working class social problems that influenced

Burnett, it was also their method of documentary observation. Whether or not

it is possible to gauge the success of the films made under Grierson’s supervi-

sion (because of their links to the films’ sponsors), many combined advocacy

with a notion of observation with minimal intervention. Burnett, with the ad-

ditional influences of cinema verité and direct cinema documentary methodolo-

gies, reworked this approach to observation for his own specific and personal

context, thus using global aesthetics for local ends.

Burnett’s method of observation is distinct from that practiced by Grierson and

Wright. Both filmmakers and other personnel associated with the Empire

Marketing Board (and later the General Post Office), originally came from the

British middle- and upper-classes and were not immediately familiar with the

concerns or experiences of their subjects. Burnett, on the other hand, lived

most of his life in the community, possessed a first-hand knowledge of the

district’s history as an African American neighborhood, and drew upon his ex-

periences for his depiction of Watts. In interviews and writings we get a sense

that Burnett’s subject matter is influenced by his own observations and experi-

ences, in which “characters are definitely based on … a collection of things I

have seen in people, in my community, in my family.”15 Yet, I want to caution

against falling into the trap of assuming a false or oversimplified indexicality

from Burnett’s observations since he never claims that his characters or set-

tings are true or real. Instead, his characters and settings are influenced by

what he’s seen and they provide us with some insight into his statement that

“Killer of Sheep is supposed to look like a documentary.”16 They are not a reflec-

tion, but rather a refraction in the Bakhtinian sense—they dialogue with con-

text but they are not mimetic replacements for reality.

Burnett’s approach to personal observation also is concordant with the Neo-

realist techniques to which he was exposed while at UCLA. Seemingly incom-

patible in terms of style and mode, Griersonian documentary and Italian Neo-

realism shared certain core attributes beyond their modest economies-of-scale.

British documentary principles, such as location shooting, the use of everyday

people, and an improvisational approach, influenced Neorealist filmmakers,

27

especially Roberto Rossellini, who began his career making nonfiction films in

Italy during WWII.17 Just as documentaries such as Grierson’s Drifters (1929)

focused on the working man (albeit as a means of championing Britain’s her-

ring industry), Italian Neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief

(1948) focused on the lives of everyday people in a fictional format. This was

an important shift in focus from the more mainstream fascination with stories

of the extraordinary practiced by Hollywood and Hollywood-influenced cin-

emas. Furthermore, both documentary and Neorealist practices emphasized

site-specific, location filmmaking, as is evidenced in the council housing in

Housing Problems and the streets of Rome in Open City (Robert Rossellini,

1945). In these examples, the space defines the film and serves as an example

of what Grierson referred to as “the drama of the doorstep.”18

Part of the Griersonian approach to documentary was an emphasis on provid-

ing the film’s subjects with a voice, as when people in the films explain their

jobs or their grievances. The sounds of the streets, particularly vernacular and

slang, can also be found in Neorealist films, although it wasn’t until the sixties

that lightweight and affordable sound technologies allowed for reliable sync-

sound recording. Direct sound became a characteristic of films in the sixties,

and its use, especially when exploring African American language and stories,

is an important facet of Burnett’s films in particular, and those of the L.A.

School as a whole (especially Gerima’s Bush Mama). The use of direct sound,

combined with location shooting, provides the films produced by the L.A.

School with a sense of documentary realism, establishing what seems to be

“only the slightest, if any, departure from the contiguous offscreen reality.”19

Burnett takes first-hand observations of his environment and transposes them

into a fictional narrative that is documentary in both look and sound. In this

combination of fictional and documentary techniques, Killer of Sheep also ex-

emplifies its Third Cinema roots in its formulation of an aesthetic that “make[s]

use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both” and uses “whatever

genre, or all genres.”20 (This is not to suggest that blaxploitation films, or other

films from the sixties and seventies,” Easy Rider [Dennis Hopper, 1969] for

instance, did not also incorporate vernacular into their soundtracks. The dif-

ference with Burnett is that his characters combine contemporary slang with

words and phrases from a Southern, rural past, thus acknowledging the influence

28

of African American history on Watts’ present, a historical perspective that is

rarer in blaxploitation films from the same time.)

In its emphasis on the everyday, Killer of Sheep also borrows closely from

Neorealism, with The Bicycle Thief its closest precursor. Both films focus on

family men and their struggles to support their families while maintaining

some semblance of dignity and self-respect. Both films also situate their di-

lemmas in specific post-traumatic contexts: The Bicycle Thief in a post-WWII

Rome recovering from bombardment and occupation and Killer of Sheep in a

post-’65 Watts showing the scars (empty lots, abandoned buildings) of the Re-

bellion. Finally, both suggest the ways in which their male leads’ existential

crises—sparked by global politics and economics—effects their families, as

both men punish their loved ones for their own perceived personal failings.

Yet, while Burnett borrows his approach to subject matter from Neorealism—

so much to that Killer of Sheep has been described as a “masterpiece of Ameri-

can neo-realism” and other similar observations21—he adapts his narrative

structure for an African American cultural context. At the time they first ap-

peared, Neorealist films were novel because of their focus on the everyday and

for their aesthetics of immediacy. But they were not novel in terms of their

narratives, which continued to be structured according to dominant (Western)

cinematic approaches to story, especially in their plot-driven, linear narratives

and in their reliance on the codes of melodrama.22 The films’ plots continued

to involve some form of narrative advancement—climax, resolution, and clo-

sure—even if modest in comparison to Hollywood classical narrative.

Killer of Sheep, on the other hand, combines a series of dramatic narrative vi-

gnettes with documentary-like nonnarrative footage both of Stan’s job in an

abattoir and of neighborhood children at play, a cyclical and episodic structure

that has its roots in African oral traditions.23 Manthia Diawara includes Killer of

Sheep in a cross-section of African American films that, as he says,

“defamiliariz[e] . . . classical film language” by “contain[ing] rhythmic and

repetitious shots, going back and forth between past and present.”24 The film

makes strange dominant film language by juxtaposing a number of seemingly

disparate scenes offering no clue to time frame and providing no sense of a

linear progression. In other words, the structure disallows conventional narrative

29

agency because the plot does not seem to progress and the rising action of

melodrama is substituted by a more permanent (or, at the least, recurring)

cycle of pathos that provides a complex sense of the frustrating sameness of

Stan’s experiences. While the sections are distinct, each is distinguished by

features that offer insight into Stan’s existential dilemma because they connect

different aspects of his life and suggest the effects of context on psyche.

Killer of Sheep’s episodic structure intertwines three stylistically distinct sec-

tions that are loosely related through setting and character. The majority of

the narrative is set in the domestic sphere and includes most of Stan’s interac-

tions with his family, as well as all of his contact with his friends, and provides

a first-hand sense of the characters’ personalities. Most of the domestic scenes

are aimed at illustrating Stan’s complex and contradictory frustrations: on the

one hand he has a demoralizing and desensitizing job that, for all his hard

work, still impoverishes his family. Stan spends his time at home emotionally

distanced from his wife and kids, and yet his malaise does not stop him from

engaging in attempts to better their lives (through laying a new kitchen floor

or trying to fix their car). While these activities suggest Stan’s attempts at

agency, the only way out of his situation—at least as presented by a number of

the men surrounding him—is to turn to crime, an option he resists. Stan is

trapped, and in many of the domestic scenes Burnett uses tight framing, long

takes, slowly-paced editing, static camera, and stilted dialogue to illustrate the

stagnation and claustrophobia of his situation. He is on a treadmill, and his

inability to effect change indicates a lack of power—as a father, as a man, as a

citizen—so profound that he can no longer envision a way to escape.

The narrative scenes are indebted to Neorealism in the use of location shoot-

ing and performances by non-professional actors, including Burnett’s daughter,

Angela (who also appeared in Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts). Most

scenes are shot in interior, domestic spaces—kitchens, bedrooms, living

rooms—and the mise-en-scene, combined with shot composition, suggests

both Stan’s paralysis and his emotional distance from those around him. An

example of this stagnation appears early in the film in a scene between Stan

and his friend Bracy. Sitting in Stan’s kitchen, the pair is framed in a two-shot,

facing each other across the table as they drink coffee and play dominoes.

30

The emotional distance between Stan and his friend is communicated by the

physical expanse separating them, while the sense of limits, of a forced immo-

bility, is suggested in the tightness of the frame (which presses in on the pair)

and their lack of movement. Additionally, the gap between the men is appar-

ent in their stilted dialogue and the long silences indicating either that they

don’t have much to say to one another or that they lack the energy, the will, or

the emotional vocabulary to communicate their thoughts and worries.

Moments between Stan and his wife (who is not named in the narrative), es-

pecially those set in the kitchen, are similarly claustrophobic and stilted, un-

derlining the couple’s almost complete emotional estrangement (an estrange-

ment that is much more Stan’s than his wife’s). Most of their scenes in the first

three-quarters of the film are shot in this manner; however, an interesting

break from this pattern occurs in a scene of the couple dancing with one an-

other. Rather than being separated by their usual physical distance within the

frame, the couple embrace to the sounds of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter

Earth.” Framed in a medium shot, they engage in a long, slow dance while

backlit by a window doubling as an additional framing device. In the static

camera and the long take this moment resembles most of the film’s other do-

mestic scenes, particularly scenes in which Stan’s wife unsuccessfully attempts

to connect with her husband. The difference in this scene is that both Stan’s

alienation from his wife and her frustration with him are nonverbally commu-

nicated through her facial expressions and body language which register desire

first, then desperation, and finally frustration and anger.

Fig. 2. Stan and Bracy in the kitchen, and Stan and his wife dancing, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977). Video frame enlargements.

31

The slow dance scene is also illustrative of the film’s complex sound design.

It is unclear whether the sound is diegetic or nondiegetic; the song is meant to

be diegetic, but no other noises are audible when it’s playing. In most of the

narrative sections, Burnett uses direct sound; however, there are times when

nondiegetic music occurs on the soundtrack. In these moments the music

functions as a sound bridge leading either into or out of the more “documen-

tary” sequences. Here Washington’s song lasts for most of the scene, com-

menting ironically on the characters’ actions, a strategy that Burnett uses more

frequently in the documentary-like sequences in the slaughterhouse or of the

children at play, the former of which are characterized by nondiegetic music.

Like the less narrative scenes, the music here comments upon the couple’s

relationship, and as such it exemplifies “the impact of black music on the new

black cinema” in its “broadening [of] the primary narrative statement” of the

film.25 The tightness of the frame may visually suggest the boundaries of the

relationship, but Dinah Washington’s voice truly captures the agony that the

emotional and physical separation has wrought on both individuals.

While family and friends offer little opportunity for emotional release, Stan’s

lesser-known acquaintances present alternatives that are not much better.

Near the beginning of the film Stan is visited at home by two men, Smoke and

Scooter, from the neighborhood. The pair are coded as street characters, their

leather jackets and hats reminiscent of the clothing choices of blaxploitation’s

pimps and dealers. In the process of discussing their exploits, Smoke and

Scooter try convincing Stan to participate in the murder of another neighbor-

hood man named Buddy. Upon overhearing their conversation, Stan’s wife first

disagrees with them over their suggestion that Stan’s participation would be

proof of his manhood, then she chases them off. The scene is shot outside the

house, which would suggest more freedom and openness than the claustropho-

bic interiors we have seen previously, but the overall shot composition and ed-

iting pattern bears a remarkable resemblance to earlier domestic scenes. It is

shot with a static camera in a long take lasting from the moment the men reach

the door of the house to a point just after Stan’s wife’s interjection. While Smoke

and Scooter proposition Stan, he sits with his back to the house with the pair

standing in the foreground, bracketing him. When Stan’s wife first appears,

she stands behind him, completing the triangle and further entrapping him.

32

As she begins to disagree with Scooter, she moves in front of Stan, removing

him from the conversation and literally erasing him from the onscreen action

(she blocks our view of him). Stan’s static and submissive position symbolizes

his paralysis in the face of both Scooter’s rather tautological demand that Stan

“can be a man if [he] can” and his wife’s definition of manliness.

This scene suggests that each component of Stan’s environment—his job, his

community, his family—attempts to define his masculinity for him. For

Smoke and Scooter manliness is related to economics and violence; as Smoke

argues, “Look at what Stan got? He don’t even have a decent pair of pants. All

we trying to do is help, nigger. You can’t live if you are afraid of dying.”26 For

Stan’s wife, masculinity is related to intelligence. Either way, Stan has little to

say in the constructions of these definitions, even when his wife urges him to

stand up for himself. The overwhelming suggestion is that Stan’s struggle

with self-definition is linked to a larger community dilemma of self-definition,

as exemplified by the tension between the men and Stan’s wife.

In its focus on the interrelated themes of masculinity, agency, and the family,

Killer of Sheep is related to a group of independent “black-subject” films from

the sixties,27 and most closely resembles Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man

(1964). Roemer’s film draws together themes of black masculinity, its relation-

ship to the family, and the prevailing social forces, such as poverty, racism, and

governmental programs (Welfare, for example), decimating African American

communities. In Nothing But a Man, Duff, the main character, is forced to

choose between quietly accepting abuse (in the form of union-busting or out-

right racism) in order to keep a job or standing up for his beliefs and hence

failing to support his family. The film’s central crisis revolves around the per-

ceived incompatibility of the maintenance of a unified African American fam-

ily and an empowered black masculinity, and suggests that doing what’s right

is a complicated venture when one takes into account the specificities of con-

text, especially poverty-line subsistence and a lack of jobs paying a living

wage. Both films offer a more complex rendering of family life than the fa-

therless, welfare-dependent black family demonized by the Moynihan report

of the sixties. The difference between’Killer of Sheep and an earlier film like

Nothing But A Man, however, is that the former’s family dilemmas are situated

33

Fig. 4. Stan entrapped outside his house, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977). Video frame enlargement.

in a post-Rebellion, and thus a more pessimistic, Watts environment. The

family has to fight against the dehumanizing combination of Stan’s job, inner-

city Los Angeles, and the lure of crime (which forms the subtext to many of

Stan’s interactions with friends and acquaintances).

While the film’s narrative episodes illustrate Stan’s interactions with family and

friends, his work experiences and urban environment are more clearly detailed

in documentary-like vignettes interspersed between them. The slaughter-

house scenes provide detail about Stan’s life as a wage-earner. As if to indicate

this change in focus from the family scenes, the film’s style changes as well,

and in this shift we can see most clearly the influence of documentary conven-

tions on Burnett’s filmmaking aesthetic. Rather than continuing with the static

camera, the long takes, and the stilted dialogue, the slaughterhouse scenes are

characterized by the shaky movements of a hand-held camera, and a looser

framing style. This visual design allows the audience to witness Stan, the other

workers, and the sheep freely move about the space of the slaughterhouse. In

34

keeping with the observational impulse of Griersonian documentary, combined

with the shaky camera work of cinema verité and the direct cinema movements,

these scenes are more directly “documentary” in their exploration of the blood

and gore of the abattoir—complete with footage of actual sheep being bled,

skinned, and dismembered.

In addition to the rapid camerawork and editing strategies, the sound design in

the slaughterhouse scenes also differs from the domestic scenes. Where the

scenes in the home are mostly shot with direct sound and the occasional piece

of music on the soundtrack, the slaughterhouse scenes are characterized by an

absence of dialogue or any other diegetic sounds and the addition of an asyn-

chronous musical soundtrack—comprised of vocal and musical blues, gospel,

swing, and orchestral pieces—that often comments ironically on the images.

In this use of sound, the scenes differ from the more observational strategies

of their closest documentary antecedents with their reliance on sync-sound

Fig. 5. Stan in the slaughterhouse, from Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett (1977). Video frame enlargement.

35

technologies. Instead, the juxtaposition of sound and image is an adaptation

of a Soviet approach to filmmaking for an African American cultural context.

For example, the first time the slaughterhouse appears on screen, the images

are accompanied by swing music. This soon segues into a children’s rendition

of “This Old Man” as the interior verité shots are replaced by long, static shots

of the abattoir’s exterior. The children’s song is a sound bridge connecting the

events occurring within the slaughterhouse to the following scene, a return to

the domestic sphere introduced with shots of Stan’s wife in the kitchen. The

lullaby links the abattoir with the kitchen not only because both spaces are

connected to Stan, but because the spaces affect his psychological state. In a

larger sense, the sound bridge relates Stan’s job to the themes that most define

the family scenes, fatigue and malaise, thus suggesting that his condition has

become a vicious cycle in which work effects home and vice versa.

The slaughterhouse scenes graphically detail Stan’s job. We know, from ear-

lier family scenes and his discussion with Bracy, that the job is a source of ten-

sion and disillusionment, and that Stan would like to find another source of

employment. The footage documenting actual blood and gore (the real

slaughter of sheep), combined with Stan’s criticisms of his job, has led most

critics to focus solely his job as the primary cause of his crisis. Nathan Grant is

more accurate, however, when he argues that “it is not his job at the slaughter-

house that is responsible for his state of ennui. Lack of connection with all that

is around him, a being out of touch, appears to have gained control.”39 Stan

seems almost paralyzed in the family scenes. He is either clearly immobile, as

in the scene with his wife, or unsuccessful in his endeavors to change things,

for instance when he and his friend Gene buy an automobile engine, only to

drop it—an ironic metaphor for the pairs’ lack of agency in Los Angeles’ car

culture. On the other hand, Stan is most active in the slaughterhouse scenes;

he moves freely in and out of the frame, sure of his actions and movements,

thus suggesting that he is neither incapable nor afraid of hard work. In the

final slaughterhouse scene Stan even manages a rare smile, an act he has prob-

lems completing in most of the family scenes and which is noted by one char-

acter earlier in the film. Thus, Stan’s crisis should be understood as part of a

combination of pressures: the slaughterhouse fails to satisfy him on both a per-

sonal and an economic level, but his family and friends, as we have seen, also

36

complicate his life by demanding that he conform to a set of expectations that

takes no account of who he is.

The third part of the film’s triad of approaches further supports the suggestion

that Stan’s internal crisis is the result of external factors. The scenes of chil-

dren at play appear first in Killer of Sheep and help introduce the film’s setting

by including footage shot on-location in Watts’ rail yards, alleyways, empty

lots, and streets. Most of the scenes use direct sound, combined with loose

shot compositions, relatively slow-paced editing, and a variety of long or me-

dium shots rather than close ups. This style provides more of a feel for the

children’s spaces than the setting for other characters in the other sections of

the film, and the view of Watts provided here is more graphic and despairing

than what we see elsewhere in Killer of Sheep. The space itself resembles a

war zone, with empty lots and abandoned buildings dotting the urbanscape.

This metaphor is carried over into the children’s activities: in almost all the

scenes, the kids are engaged in some sort of combative play, ranging from

rock-throwing battles, to wrestling, hitting, and bullying each other (normally

on the basis of gender). The family scenes also include examples of children

at play, but with the exclusion of the sibling rivalries between Stan, Jr. and

Angie, these interactions are peaceful in comparison. Perhaps it is because of

the bloody footage of dead sheep that the abattoir scenes have received more

critical attention, but the children’s scenes offer more compelling suggestions

about context: in the streets, the interactions are violent, with the shots of

kids throwing rocks eerily echoing the televised images of Watts from a de-

cade before.

While the children’s scenes are not directly related to Stan’s narrative, they are

connected to the overall story through the presence of Stan, Jr. and Angie in a

few of the earlier episodes. The connections with Stan are much more allegori-

cal and center on the suggestion that the community is in crisis: Watts, accord-

ing to Burnett, was left with “a vacuum—moral, economic, political”; it was a

“community without a center.”29 By linking Stan’s crisis, as explicated in

other parts of the film, with his immediate context (Watts of the past and

present), Killer of Sheep expands what first appears as a sole focus on a singular

hero and suggests that Stan’s existential dilemma is undeniably linked to a

37

larger community crisis. With this connection Burnett shifts conventional

narrative identification from the individual to the community, thus adapting

the film’s narrative for an African American collectivity by expanding the aes-

thetic influences of Neorealism and documentary and disputing blaxploi-

tation’s assertion that an empowered lone male figure leads to salvation.

The expansion from individual to community is made most clearly in one of

the rare moments when the children’s sections shift out of sync-sound. In an

episode in which the kids play near an abandoned building, the direct sounds

are joined by the nondiegetic sound of Paul Robeson singing “The House I

Live In.” As the song continues, the images of kids at play are replaced by

footage of the interior of the abattoir. Again, there is the faint, synchronized

noise of the space, now combined with Robeson’s voice on the soundtrack. To

Robeson’s repeated refrain, “What is America to Me?,” sheep are led to the

slaughter. At this, the images segue to another narrative episode, the scene

with Smoke and Scooter discussed earlier. The series of cuts, combined with

the unifying sound bridge, expands the dilemma from a single focus on Stan to

his entire community by linking playful violence (acted out in the empty lots

left in the wake of the Rebellion), literal capitalist violence (Stan’s dehumaniz-

ing and bloody job), and the neighborhood’s prevalence of violent crime (the

result of a post-Rebellion, post-industrial economy). According to Grant, in

the combination of slaughterhouse images and the narrative scene focusing on

murder, Stan “is witnessing not only the threat to his own survival as that is

made evident by the actions of his friends, but he is also watching his

community’s self-destruction.”30 Grant’s observation, while prescient, is lim-

ited to Stan’s difficult job and Smoke and Scooter’s plans for a murder; my as-

sertion is that we also see the continuation of community self-destruction in

the kids’ activities and surroundings. In this context, the family not only con-

tends against the specific forces Stan faces, but also those awaiting the next

generation, Stan, Jr. and Angie. Stan Jr.’s budding nihilism is suggested by his

repeated statements about needing money and his sullen demeanor. More-

over, he seems as distant from his family, especially his mother, as is his father.

Stan Jr.’s emotional distance is much more malicious however, as he misbe-

haves and, by the end of the film, refuses to come when his mother calls.

38

Burnett’s concern for the community and its future welfare, can be traced back

to his first-hand knowledge of Watts. His observations regarding the area’s loss

of a center—a shared epistemology of sorts—remembers a pre-1965 period, when

Watts did have a center (a center that was perhaps best captured in Carl

Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress in 1995). Killer of Sheep links the area’s African

American community base to its rural, southern past—the “back home” that

Stan mentions near the beginning of the film and in other subtle references to

his and his wife’s southern roots—and the migration that resulted in the growth

of a vibrant black community in Los Angeles during the forties. This past is

quoted in the vernacular spoken by some characters in the film and in the rail-

road yards and trains used by the children as a playground and toys. (It will be

quoted fifteen years later in a similar scene in John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood

in 1991.) The sounds and shots of the past reference a form of social and geo-

graphic mobility that, Burnett suggests, was disappearing for men of Stan’s gen-

eration and is all but gone for Stan, Jr. In the Los Angeles captured in Killer of

Sheep, social mobility is curtailed by higher unemployment and a lack of job

opportunities like the defense industry and porter jobs that promised a move

into the middle classes for many African Americans of Stan’s father’s generation.

Stan’s generation seems stuck in the wreckage of a post-industrial, post-Rebel-

lion urban landscape. What remains are low-paying and demoralizing jobs, like

Stan’s (and what Bracy refers to as a’“slave”) that lead nowhere. He embodies

middle-class work ethic and ideology that is ultimately out-moded in the con-

text of late-twentieth century industrial practices. Stan labors but he will

never get ahead.

These historical and cultural references, as well as the film’s episodic narrative

structure, suggest the impossibility of considering’Killer of Sheep’s Watts’ setting

without a comparable consideration of its history. Such spatio-temporal relation-

ships are connected to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, or “materi-

alized history” where temporal relationships are made literal by the objects,

spaces, or persons with which they intersect.31 While seemingly geared towards

Western literary texts, the chronotope is a useful concept for analyzing Third

Cinema texts that, according to Paul Willeman, organize “time and space in their

own specific ways.”32 Elsewhere, I’ve used the chronotope as a tool for analyz-

ing African American cinematic constructions of the city and to argue that

39

sections of the urbanscape associated with African American life are presented

as truly material (whether contemporary, recent, or older), as the streets and

buildings call up a multiplicity of pasts.33 In a related way, Burnett’s rendering of

the abandoned lots and railroad yards of Watts illustrates both the history of an

African American presence in the city and (possibly more importantly) provides

a sense of the paradox presented by the city: migration was what enabled the

settlement of Watts in the first place, but the mobility of the area’s black popula-

tion became severely constrained over time. Stan’s experiences are thus re-

lated to a larger historical and political context, and as such his quiescence rep-

resents failed expectations and the lack of options on a much more global scale.

What is surprising then is that the film ends on a slightly uplifting, though

definitely unresolved note when Stan, his wife, and Angie return from an

unsuccessful attempt to spend the day at the racetrack. For a brief moment

there is an intimacy in the trio’s interactions, as Stan answers Angie’s query

about the origins of thunder during a storm. As Stan provides Angie with an

explanation, drawing upon a folk tale about the devil beating his wife, the

three exchange glances and smile at one another. In the course of the film,

this is the first time that Stan has shown any sort pleasure towards his wife and

children and it suggests the possibility of a continuing, if tentative, intimacy in

the household in spite of the surrounding conditions. In using the folk refer-

ences in one of the rare scenes of connection among family members, Burnett

suggests that the welfare of Stan, of his family, and of the community as a

whole, is dependent upon the maintenance of an historical perspective that

acknowledges a southern, or rural, past.

In Killer of Sheep, Third Cinema, documentary, and Neorealist influences, com-

bined with Burnett’s personal knowledge of Watts, create a unique form of

cinematic realism that marries techniques such as on-location shooting, long

takes and direct sound, with the more disparate stylistics of moving camera,

rapid editing, and the ironic juxtaposition of sound and image. On its most

literal level, the film focuses on Stan and his interactions with his family and

friends by providing vignettes of his day-to-day existence. On a more allegori-

cal level, the film explores Stan’s crisis of self-definition, and its relationship

to masculinity and the family, linking his experiences to a community-wide

40

dilemma faced by, at the least, the African American residents of Watts. In its

polyphonic combination of documentary and fictional modes, the film is an

example of what Third Cinema filmmakers and members of the L.A. School

were striving for in their filmmaking in the sixties and seventies: the formula-

tion of an aesthetic that dialogued with and refracted a unique set of cultural

conditions. Killer of Sheep offers one example of what this might mean for a

post-Civil Rights, post-’65 alternative filmmaking practice.

Notes

1. Robert Mayer, ed., Los Angeles: A Chronological and Documentary History, 1542–1976 (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1978), 136. 2. Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1993), 74. 3. Thomas Cripps, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and the Changing Politics of Genre Film,” in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 240. 4. James A. Snead, “Images of Blacks in Black Independent Films: A Brief Survey” in Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, eds. Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 22. 5. Paul Willeman, “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,” in Questions of Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, (London: BFI Pub., 1989), 4. 6. Willeman, 108. 7. Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 110. 8. Masilela, 111. 9. Quoted in James P. Murray, “Running With Sweetback” Black Creation 3:1 (Fall 1971): 10. 10. Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 119-20. 11. Willeman, 5. 12. Ibid. 13. Masilela, 112. 14. Quoted in Bérénice Reynaud, “An Interview with Charles Burnett,” Black American Literature Forum 25.2 (Summer 1991): 328. 15. Reynaud, 326. 16. Quoted in Monona Wali, “Life Drawings: Charles Burnett’s Realism,” The Indepen- dent 11.8 (October 1988): 20. Emphasis added. 17. Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema (Cranbury, New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 19. 18. Quoted in Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85. 19. Clyde Taylor, “Decolonizing the Image: New U.S. Black Cinema,” Peter Steven, ed., Jump Cut: Hollywood, Politics, and Counter Cinema (New York: Praeger Pub., 1985), 168.

41

20. Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 81. 21. Wali, 16. 22. Andre Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” in What is Cinema?, vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 21. 23. Taylor, 172. 24. Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. 25. Taylor, 174-5. 26. Phyllis Rauch Klotman, ed., Screenplays of the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 105. 27. Taylor, 167. 28. Nathan Grant, “Innocence and Ambiguity in the Films of Charles Burnett,” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 139. 29. Wali, 17. 30. Grant, 140. 31. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist, ed., Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 247. 32. Willeman, 15. 33. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 4-9.