Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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important African American film director, is relatively unknown outside the world of committed cinephiles. One of the many reasons he deserves greater attention is that virtually the whole of his remarkable career has been devoted to the proposition that Black Lives Matter. His feature pictures have dealt with poor black families struggling to survive in Los Angeles (Killer of Sheep [1977]), generational or social-class tensions that threaten to split black families apart (To Sleep with Anger [1990]), police murders and incarcerations of innocent black men (The Glass Shield [1994]), black attempts to achieve literacy under the nightmarish conditions of plantation-era slavery (Nightjohn [1996]), and the bloody Namibian war for independence from South Africa (Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation [2007]). His experimental documentaries and short films have concerned the Nat Turner rebellion (Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property [2003]), the poverty of a black single mother (When It Rains [1995]), urban homelessness (The Final Insult [1997]), and the displacement of blacks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (Quiet as Kept [2007]). Even his lively, semidocumentary celebration of blues music (Warming by the Devil’s Fire [2003]) is filled with archival material showing that behind the music is a history of lynching and enforced labor of blacks in the American South. As I write he’s at work on two documentaries, one about the 1960s civil rights movement to end segregated hospitals, and the other, in cooperation with the Watts Community Action Center, about chemical poisoning of water in South Central Los Angeles. He recently told Spanish interviewers that the “stand your ground” law and the wave of police shootings of unarmed blacks in the United States are reversions to pre-1960s terrorism directed against the black community. “I live in fear every day,” he told the interviewers. “Every time my sons leave their house, I worry about them coming back” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 68–69).
To frame Burnett only in these terms, however, is to limit and potentially ghettoize his importance. Burnett is a major film artist whose work involves a nuanced representation of conflicts and affectionate bonds not only within black communities but also between blacks and whites; his films demonstrate generosity of spirit, defamiliarizing power, and general relevance as social criticism. “[T]o call yourself a black filmmaker,” he has said, “is a political statement and has the effect of causing less opportunities to work or have your film produced. . . . People ask why I call myself a black filmmaker and I respond by saying that I was given that title because I didn’t fit with the mainstream. The fact of the matter also is I do make films that focus on the black community. I’m like a subset because in actual fact I make films about America” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 65).
Unfortunately cultural, social, economic, and political conditions in the United States are such that a filmmaker of Burnett’s integrity and sense of purpose is given few opportunities to reach a large public and sometimes even to practice his art. There’s nothing obscure about his work (several of his pictures are straightforward history lessons aimed at teenagers), but he resists melodrama; doesn’t traffic in sex and violence; and assumes a caring, thoughtful audience. Hence, his work doesn’t appeal to your average Hollywood producer. In an era when “independent film” in the United States has become a signifier of niche marketing, Burnett has remained about as authentic an independent as one can be and is faced with all the disadvantages and disappointments such a position entails. Filmmaking, he has pointed out, requires “people who can finance a film and understand what you’re trying to do and agree and sympathize with you and who feel the same passion you do and want to help you get it done. In this business, it doesn’t happen that way. You have to take an idea and try to sell it to people . . . Some people don’t get it and you go in knowing it’s going to be a hard sell” (Martin and Julien 2009, 29).
Burnett’s16mm Killer of Sheep, completed in 1973 as an MFA thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and shown at a few theatrical venues in 1977, has been listed as one of the one hundred essential pictures in U.S. history by the National Society of Film Critics and was among the first films to be designated a “National Treasure” by the Library of Congress, but it wasn’t widely available for viewing until 2007, when it was restored by UCLA preservationist Ross Lipman and produced on DVD by Steven Soderbergh and Milestone Films. Burnett’s next feature, the 35mm My Brother’s Wedding (1984), was completed with the partial assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was well received by critics but took three years to make and was given only limited release. During the late 1970s and 1980s Burnett produced, wrote, directed, and photographed his films, plus photographing Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), contributing photography and editing to Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), and writing and photographing Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), all the while supporting himself by teaching filmmaking and working at a script agency in Los Angeles. A MacArthur “genius” grant and collaboration with Danny Glover and producer Edward Pressman helped him raise more than $1 million for his first widely exhibited picture, To Sleep with Anger, but digital versions of this extraordinary film were unavailable in the United States for many years. Burnett subsequently directed two films that might be described as Hollywood genre projects, The Glass Shield (1994) and The Annihilation of Fish (1999), although the results were unconventional by any standard; the first was handled unintelligently by Miramax and the second never found a distributor. He has also made several brilliant shorts and documentaries, as well as a series of made-for-television movies for such organizations as Disney, the Hallmark Channel, and Oprah Winfrey. He avoids the sleek comedy style made popular in recent years by black directors Kevin Rodney Sullivan and Tyler Perry, and this, together with his interest in emotion rather than blood-and-sex spectacle, has resulted in his finding only sporadic work at the margins of the marketplace, including the outstanding Disney TV movie Nightjohn; several short films; some documentaries; and the half-documentary, half-fictional Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Burnett’s career has involved more than the usual battles to maintain financing and artistic control, even in the case of Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, a wide-screen color film shot in Africa. The development of digital cinema has helped him in certain ways but has also required that he move away from the fundamentally photographic aesthetic with which he began. “I never really call myself a filmmaker,” he once told Bernard Weintraub, “because of the fact that it’s so infrequent that I do it” (interview in New York Times, January 30, 1997).
Since Burnett made that statement, he has directed fifteen films of varying lengths under varying production conditions for movie theaters or U.S. and European television, thus building an important if not widely known career. In this book I have tried to present a straightforward, reasonably comprehensive critical study of his work in roughly chronological fashion. I write for those who already know Burnett’s films, but also in hopes of piquing the curiosity of those who may not know them. Because some of the films are difficult to see, I’ve interwoven detailed description with commentary. I haven’t discussed several pictures that seem to me relatively unimportant. For example, I’ve omitted the ninety-minute PBS-TV documentary entitled America‘Becoming (1991), which he directed, photographed, and cowrote with the aid of a Rockefeller grant. It’s a competent film about how immigrants have contributed to the national imaginary, but Burnett was bitterly disappointed by the restrictions PBS placed on him. He and his producer, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, had to fight to include a segment on a black community in Philadelphia and were prevented from doing a segment on Native Americans; whenever their on-site discoveries conflicted with scholarly research, they were distrusted, and they had to follow predetermined dictates. “In the end,” he has said, “it became a nightmare” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 67). I’ve also omitted discussion of one of his TV films, Relative Stranger (2008), which he directed for the Hallmark Channel. It tells the story of a former football star who has abandoned his middle-class family and been reduced to driving a cab in Chicago; when this character’s father dies, he returns to the family for the reading of the will and gradually confronts his shame, healing old wounds. The sentimentality of the story is exacerbated by an almost wall-to-wall musical score, but Burnett does a fine job of keeping the acting understated, and gets an especially good performance from Eriq La Salle in the leading role.
Certain aspects of Burnett’s work that I have emphasized in this book should be mentioned at the outset and can be described in terms of artists or films he has publicly praised. He once remarked to Michael Sragow at the New York Times