Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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New York Times, Janet Maslin gave it an astonishingly wrongheaded review, describing it as “arid,” with nice moments but without “the kind of coherence that might give them larger meaning.” She even complained that “the slaughter of the sheep is numbingly uneventful” (1978, C10). Sight and Sound proclaimed it “sincere but fatally scrappy and meandering” (“On Now” 1982, 216). In Europe, however, it was much admired, and in 1981 received the Critics’ Award at the Berlin Film Festival. This opened greater possibilities for limited theatrical distribution, but at the time Burnett was still trying to secure rights for the music. In October 1981 Variety declared that “marketplace possibilities are slim outside of specialty and festival situations for this admirable effort.” The film’s reputation nevertheless grew, and in 1990 it was among the first pictures selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Nearly thirty years after it was made, UCLA’s Ross Lipman restored the print and converted it to 35mm; Milestone Films raised $150,000 ($75,000 of which came from Steven Soderbergh) to acquire music rights and bring it to a wider public via cinemas and DVD. By that time, Killer of Sheep had become legendary, influencing not only films of the L.A. Rebellion but also such later pictures as David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000) and, in a less pronounced way, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016). Decades earlier, working as what he describes as a “callow third-stringer” at the Village Voice, J. Hoberman had given it a short, relatively dismissive review, but when it was reissued by Milestone, Hoberman (2007) confessed his error, praised the film, discussed its influence, and remarked that its reputation was now so great that it threatened to overshadow some of the impressive work of Burnett’s subsequent career, much as Citizen Kane overshadows the popular conception of Orson Welles’s later work.
Burnett’s less well known second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), has suffered relative neglect in part because it encountered production difficulties that hampered its release and critical reception. Like Killer of Sheep, it was produced, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Burnett. His wife was a coproducer, and he involved a number of young black filmmakers in Los Angeles in the project: Julie Dash was one of the assistant directors, and the credits for the film list a dozen associate or assistant editors. The $80,000 budget was funded chiefly by German public TV (ZDF, or Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), Canadian investors, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Burnett had trouble meeting a deadline imposed by his German backers due to delays caused by weather and by the film’s leading actor, Everette Silas, who disappeared in the middle of shooting. Burnett eventually tracked Silas down in the South, where he claimed to have become an ordained minister, and flew him back to Los Angeles; Silas disembarked wearing a Dracula cape and demanding more money. As the German deadline drew near, Burnett tried to cut the film’s rough assembly by thirty minutes but was unable to find the $8,000 he needed for the job. As a result, My Brother’s Wedding had very limited showings, and Burnett’s production company had to declare bankruptcy. It was not until the Milestone/Pacific Film Archive restoration, supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, that he was able to edit a version more to his liking. “It was difficult to get back to it because I didn’t have access to all the material I had shot,” Burnett explained to James Bell of Sight and Sound. “It was a matter of trimming rather than being able to take scenes and make them work by using [alternative takes]. I was able to cut a lot of the bad performances, but if I’d had all the original material it would have been a lot better. It’s not what I originally intended” (Kapsis 2011, 184). Both versions of the film are included as extras on the Milestone DVD set of Killer of Sheep. I’ve chosen the shorter, “director’s cut” for the following discussion.
Killer of Sheep was shot in grainy, documentary-style, 16mm black and white and was concerned with the lowest levels of the 1970s Watts economy. As we’ve seen, it took the form of a series of vignettes without strong narrative closure, portraying the quotidian life of a black husband, wife, and two kids. Generational conflicts were only hinted at, such as the rebellion of Stan’s son or the attempts of the parents to divest their children of southern manners. Black religion played no part, and there were no evident class conflicts in the community. In contrast, My Brother’s Wedding, which Burnett hoped would reach a larger audience, was shot in Academy-ratio 35mm color. It deals not only with the Watts working class of the 1980s but also with black small business owners and the black bourgeoisie. Throughout, it dramatizes sharply delineated class and generational conflicts, among them conflicts between a religious older generation and a secular younger generation, and it has a relatively strong closure. Burnett describes it as a “satiric” and “didactic” film, and Amy Corbin rightly observes that it has a mixed effect, shifting between realistic scenes that encourage the audience’s emotional involvement and more or less Brechtian or broadly comic scenes that create a distancing effect (2014, 34–56).
The film opens with a brief autonomous shot: a close-up of elderly singer/harmonica player Dr. Henry Gordon, dressed in formal attire, standing in a dark limbo and mournfully performing “Amazing Grace.” (The credits for the film incorrectly identify the song as “The Old Rugged Cross.”) Gordon’s location and narrative function aren’t clear, but he seems to be in a church, foreshadowing the two religious ceremonies—a wedding and a funeral—that climax the film.
When the story proper opens, it centers on thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy (Silas), who, we eventually learn, has gone to trade school in hopes of becoming a heavy equipment operator, only to discover that “everybody was going to school to be the same thing.” Since then, he’s had a series of low-wage jobs: driving a cement mixer, working as a brakeman on the railroad, and driving trucks that carry explosives and dangerous materials. Currently he lives rent free with his parents and works in their small dry-cleaning shop. Tall, gangling, often dour or sullen, Pierce is both drifting through life and constantly rushing somewhere, figuratively and sometimes literally pulled in two directions by his family and friends. In the opening scene, Burnett establishes his condition by means of a physical to and fro: Pierce is hurriedly walking down a sidewalk on his way to visit the mother of his friend Soldier when a young woman bursts out of a house behind him and shouts, “Come see my sister’s baby!” Grabbing him by the arm, she pulls him back in her direction and asks, “What kind of friend are you?” Inside the house, he reluctantly agrees to hold the baby for a few moments and wonders, “Who is the daddy?” Cut to the child’s mother, wearing a house robe, sitting at a nearby kitchen table, and gloomily smoking a cigarette. Pierce backs away from what looks like an attempt to recruit him as a father and rushes off to complete his original mission. As he walks along, he passes two girls on the cusp of adolescence, standing on a street corner. One of them (Angela Burnett, almost grown and still a charming actor) calls out to him. He stops, turns, and unhappily walks over to her. “There’s something I had to tell you,” she says flirtatiously, squirming and grinning, “but I forgot.” She and her friend giggle. Almost rolling his eyes, Pierce silently turns and continues on his way.
When Pierce at last reaches his destination, the ruefully comic tone gives way to a quiet, serious conversation. He and Soldier’s mother are seated in her kitchen (many of the key scenes in Burnett’s early films take place in kitchens, which function as the heart of the family), and from what they say we can infer that Soldier is about to be released from prison. Their conversation is intercut with shots of Soldier’s father outside the house, stomping on a pile of soda cans to redeem them for money, then coming inside to fall wearily into bed. The mother holds a broken china cup—one of several instances when Burnett makes good use of an actor and an object—and sadly wonders, “Will Soldier ever act his age?” Pierce assures her of Soldier’s desire to change his ways: “He said he’s never going back. He even asked me to help him look for a job. He’s never done anything mean or vicious, never used dope. He’s nothing like these kids today. If you look at it, we’re pretty much alike.” But the mother doesn’t agree: “You and your brother never got into trouble.” Pierce makes a quiet, sincere pledge: “I promise you, I’ll do whatever I can to keep him out of trouble.”
Pierce’s promise to his friend’s mother motivates one part of the film’s double plot. The other part is motivated by his grudging but equally important promise to his family to act as best man in his older brother’s forthcoming wedding. One of the unusual qualities of this structure