Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore
Intro:
It’s not an easy watch, but it is rewarding... by letting us experience slices of life with Stan and his kids, we are left feeling the sense of claustrophobia and hopelessness and the desperation that it gives birth to.
There’s an overall sense of oppressive ennui in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a film shot for $10,000 by Burnett as his Masters thesis while he was studying at UCLA Film School.
It shows us the mundane existence of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), who works long hours in a slaughterhouse. Returning home to his wife (Kaycee Moore) and kids, Stan emanates a deep dissatisfaction with his lot in life and his daily slog through a repetitive existence.
Much like the observational slices of life in a film like Richard Linklater’s Slacker, we observe Stan in this milieu: as he fixes his sink, as he works on his lino floor, as he parents his kids and complains about his inability to sleep. His wife tries to engage Stan and connect with him, but Stan is unmoored and overwhelmed, trying to stay afloat amid the futile circumstances that he is caught in.
Like a collage of life events without peaks and troughs, it is a dirge of disaffection. The aimlessness of bored youth, suburbs caught in the listless haze of summer and the crushing oppression of the inability to control or change the course of your life.
The disjointed structure delivers a sequence of scenes without any overall context: children play war on an abandoned lot, one is hurt momentarily, the rest stop playing and check on him. Then the group gravitate towards rail tracks where they throw rocks at a passing train. Another scene has kids playing in an alley as they watch two men vault a fence with a large TV they’ve just stolen; these scenes are interspersed with decontextualised episodes featuring Stan going about his day: where he tries to buy a car engine, when he’s asked by a white woman to work for her and when friends attempt to convince him to take part in a crime.
Killer of Sheep has gained a reputation on the festival circuit in the years since it was made because its music rights were so prohibitively expensive and theatrical distribution wasn’t possible (the soundtrack features Dinah Washington, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson and Earth, Wind & Fire). The music rights were eventually ironed out (thanks to a donation from Steven Soderbergh) and it was restored by UCLA and blown up from 16mm to 35mm, for a 2007 release.
It’s not an easy watch, but it is rewarding. Burnett grew up in Watts in South Los Angeles. That community gained notoriety during the 1965 riots as well as during the 1992 LA riots. Watts is front and centre here as a location and it’s in these autobiographical details that Burnett’s film achieves its power: by letting us experience slices of life with Stan and his kids, we are left feeling the sense of claustrophobia and hopelessness and the desperation that it gives birth to.
