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FLICKS: Killer of Sheep Killer of Sheep is something of a miracle—a student film that comes close to greatness by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob Charles Burnett is a Mississipi-born African American director, 63 years old, who has consistently sought to portray the lives and address the concerns of black people in his films. Despite much critical esteem and many awards, he hasn't achieved a popular success, and his films have generally received lackluster marketing and distribution from Hollywood. Now, his first feature, Killer of Sheep, made in 1977, is getting its first theatrical release. This was Burnett's graduate piece for UCLA Film School. Up until now, it's only been seen at festivals or special art theater screenings. Part of the problem was that the soundtrack features a lot of great music that ran into copyright issues. Nevertheless, it was one of the first films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress by the National Film Registry.

Killer of Sheep is something of a miracle—a student film that comes close to greatness. For his nonprofessional cast Burnett used friends and people that he knew in his Watts neighborhood. The result is a portrait of life in the ghetto remarkable for its realism. Thrust into a series of scenes featuring many different characters, the audience must pay close attention until it becomes clear what the relationships are. Gradually a story emerges concerning a slaughterhouse worker named Stan (played by Henry Gale Sanders), married with two kids, who is dissatisfied with his life but is unclear as to why. His wife wants more intimacy, but he closes himself off to her. Friends try to get him involved in some shady dealings—he rebuffs them. His everyday life is filled with setbacks and frustrations.

Even this outline of the film makes it seem as if is has a linear story-line, but it's really more like a series of fly-on-the-wall snapshots of neighborhood life. The effect is like a tapestry or mosaic which reproduces the day-to-day experience of that world. The dialogue is raw and semi-improvised. Most effective are the sequences involving children—amazingly natural depictions of kids playing in the street, interacting with each other, entertaining themselves through the slightest means, and this is a sort of counterpoint to the adults who are usually squabbling about something. The film is unsparing of its characters. No attempt is made to soften the pettiness, ignorance, and even viciousness that manifests in the lives of the poor. Neither is there a sense of being preached at. The tone is ironic, and sometimes very funny. The visual style is supremely objective, with the one allegorical element being scenes of sheep in the slaughterhouse, a metaphor that couldn't be clearer.

We have here a portrait of life on the margins, shown from the inside, with a radical style and texture that shakes up our routine responses. Killer of Sheep is as brilliant and relevant today as it was thirty years ago.