Killer of Sheep (1977)

Charles Burnett’s tender and witty tale of a disillusioned slaughterhouse worker and the solace to be found in the simplest moments of life.

It’s hard to believe there was a time when Killer of Sheep wasn’t widely recognized as a canonical work. The operative word however, is widely: it got great reviews from its moment of premiere in 1978. So why the recognition gap? In some ways it’s a story that parallels the film itself: it simply lacked the cultural benefits of more privileged contemporary productions. Killer of Sheep was made on shoestring while writer/director Charles Burnett was still a student at UCLA, studying under luminaries including Basil Wright and Elyseo Taylor. Despite the looming presence of Hollywood, Burnett found inspiration in the Italian Neorealist films he saw in class, and defying expectations, adapted the department’s resources to tell tales of a previously undocumented America: everyday lives amongst the black community he knew in East Los Angeles.

But just as the film’s subjects were in a sense ghetto-ized, so was the film. Without funds available music rights couldn’t be cleared, and the film spent several decades as highly lauded marginalia. I first saw it in a poor-quality 16mm print in the mid 1980’s: the only way it could be seen at the time. The picture was soft and the dialogue muffled, leaving me with the memory of a feeling as much as anything else. It wasn’t till I was fortunate to restore the film for the UCLA Film & Television Archive in the early 2000’s – when improved laboratory techniques allowing Burnett’s brilliant photography and dialogue to emerge – that I realized its true genius. The visionary team at Milestone Films concurred, going through Herculean battles to clear the music rights, and launched its first international 35mm release in 2007, a full thirty years after its completion.

Suddenly wide audiences throughout the world were seeing scenes that have since been etched forever in our collective memory: young children filmed from below as the leap across the gap between tenement rooftops; a hard-won car engine teetering precariously on the edge of a departing truck, the sad lonely dance of slaughterhouse worker Henry Sanders and his wife, Kaycee Moore.

Upon the restoration’s premiere, I was occasionally fortunate to present the film with Charles in attendance, and would introduce him not as one of America’s “great black directors” but rather as one of the “great American directors.” It’s true he’s spent a career championing black lives in his storytelling, but I always felt the former term was not enough, and implied a privileging the work decried. Now I think it’s probably time to omit the true but limiting American descriptor as well: he’s simply one of “the world’s great directors.”

Ross Lipman

1977 USA
Directed by
Charles Burnett
Produced by
Charles Burnett
Written by
Charles Burnett
Featuring
Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy
Running time
84 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for Killer of Sheep

Critics

Mubarak Ali
New Zealand
Thomas Allenbach
Switzerland
Upekha Bandaranayake
UK
Grace Barber-Plentie
UK
Colin Beckett
USA
Maya S. Cade
USA
Jenny Chamarette
UK
Robyn Citizen
Canada
Robert Daniels
USA
Manohla Dargis
USA
Glyn Davis
UK
Rachael Disbury
UK
Dennis Doros
USA
Allyson Nadia Field
USA
Neil Fox
UK
Loreta Gandolfi
UK
Racquel J. Gates
USA
Leo Goldsmith
USA
Lalitha Gopalan
USA
Haden Guest
USA
Malini Guha
Canada
Sandra Hebron
UK
Liz Helfgott
USA
Amy Heller
USA
Maori Holmes
USA
Patrick Holzapfel
Germany/Austria
Bruce Jenkins
USA
Ross Lipman
USA
Akira Mizuta Lippit
USA
Ivone Margulies
USA
David Marriot
USA
Bob Mastrangelo
USA
Jelena Milosavljevic
UK
Daniel Morgan
USA
Adam Murray
UK
Charles Musser
USA
James Naremore
USA
Isabel Orellana Guarello
Chile
Adam Piron
USA
Andy Rector
USA
Julian Ross
Netherlands
Rox Samer
USA
Amy Sloper
USA
Dana Stevens
USA
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
USA
Thirza Wakefield
UK
Tom White
USA
Matthias Wittmann
Switzerland/Austria
Jason Wood
UK
Adam Woodward
UK
Genevieve Yue
USA

Directors

Joseph Bull
UK
Alex Cox
US
Amanda Egbe
UK
Barry Jenkins
USA
Lynne Ramsay
UK
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
UK