Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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to exist, the power to endure were always part of his theme” (January 1, 1995). As Faulkner had put it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he wanted to help readers “endure and prevail.” Several of Burnett’s films involve a physical and psychological struggle to endure under circumstances more impoverished and cruel than those in Faulkner’s novels, but through an exact attention to suffering and a rueful sense of humor that Burnett’s critics have underemphasized, they dramatize endurance and offer a measure of redemption. Burnett also shares something of Faulkner’s reverence for preindustrial or agrarian culture: in his case, the arts, religion, and satirical folklore that blacks brought with them from the South into the northern and western cities. One of his recurring themes is the country versus the city, expressed through family traditions or manners that once helped enslaved or segregated communities survive but were later threatened by urban discrimination.
Much of Burnett’s early work was shot in the streets using nonprofessional actors, and for that reason some commentators have assumed that Italian neorealism influenced him. When asked about this in interviews, he has praised Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946) and Umberto D. (1952), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), and Allesandro Blasetti’s little-known 1860 (1934). He has also said that he admires the contrast between the neorealists’ spare simplicity and underlying complexity, and that “you can’t find any other form as poetic as neo-realism” (Martin and Julien 2009, 10). He usually adds, however, that he had no special interest in the Italians when he began. (More likely candidates for influence were the early films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Ousmane Sembene, which Burnett saw as a student at UCLA.) Armand White, in liner notes to the DVD edition of Killer of Sheep, emphasizes that “Burnett’s astringent view of poverty and quotidian meanness is the opposite of DeSica’s plangent sentiment.” I agree, but there’s something pertinent in Burnett’s avowed interest in the “poetic.” This may account for the fact that Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) is one of his favorite pictures ( Kapsis 2011, 66). Vigo’s film achieves a mix of naturalistic asperity and surrealism, and in a somewhat analogous way Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger infuses the story of an ordinary black family in Los Angeles with oneiric, magical, and folkloric qualities. Killer of Sheep is a more realistic kind of film, but its power derives in some degree from its beautifully selected music and almost magical images of poor children at play in the streets.
Children and young people are especially important in Burnett’s films (another characteristic he shares with the neorealists, not only in Italy but also in Latin America). They function sometimes as onlookers, sometimes as leading characters or central points of view, and sometimes as the target audience. Significantly, his first student film with a synchronized sound track, the twenty-nine-minute Several Friends (1969), opens with a shot involving a child. The setting is a sunlit, dusty alleyway running behind fenced houses in the Watts area of Los Angeles. (It’s the alley behind the house where Burnett once lived.) At the right of the screen a drunken soldier in a U.S. Army uniform staggers a few steps, gripping a whiskey bottle in one hand and weaving as if his legs are about to give way. At the left a little girl in a bright Sunday dress, not much older than a toddler, stands almost as unsteadily as the soldier and looks on in mute confusion. Cut to a low-angle shot from over her shoulder as a car suddenly drives up and stops. Two young men lean out the car’s window and one of them shouts, “Where’s your daddy at?” The little girl awkwardly points a finger toward the drunkard. The car drives off, and from over the little girl’s shoulder we see that the soldier has fallen to the ground and is barely conscious.
Several Friends isn’t as bleak as this may sound; it has comic scenes, although it repeatedly emphasizes the characters’ inability to deal with the social forces that determine their lives. A film of symptomatic vignettes, it was photographed in the neighborhood where Burnett grew up and is more typical of his early work and instincts as a filmmaker than are his more tightly plotted later films; like Killer of Sheep, it has the raw, nonjudgmental quality of a fly-on-the wall documentary, a loving sensitivity to quotidian speech and gesture, and the elliptical structure of jazz. In a larger sense, it’s symptomatic of Burnett’s abiding interests. Like everything he has done, it conveys an unpuritanical but moral concern. Unlike the face-on-the-barroom-floor melodramas of the D. W. Griffith era or the social-uplift films of Oscar Micheaux, it has less to do with individuals than with a community in need of a compass. The characters’ loss of direction is the result of mostly unseen conditions outside the black ghetto (the uniformed black soldier gives indirect evidence of those conditions, especially when we realize that Several Friends was made at the height of the Vietnam War) but is intensified by the difficulty of achieving transformative consciousness from within the ghetto.
In “Inner City Blues” (1989), a short essay that serves as a kind of manifesto of Burnett’s aims during the early period of his career, he compares poor American blacks to the Italian villagers in Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine, in which a revolutionary tries to explain “that certain things—food and shelter and the right to happiness—belong to everyone, but the villagers can’t conceive these things as a part of their reality” (223). In the ghetto, Burnett says, daily life is ruled by immediate, elemental responses to pain and pleasure; furthermore, “politically speaking, there is a large reactionary and/or chauvinistic point of view in the inner city” (224). The child in Several Friends is heir to an environment in which the ground for social action has been so deeply eroded or crushed by racism that it barely exists.
Conditions in U.S. cities have in some respects grown worse since Burnett began his career: black children are shot dead in the crossfire from neighborhood gangs, and innocent young black men continue to be killed by cops. In Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (2015), Jill Leovy, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, points out that although African American males make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of U.S. deaths by murder. They’re also, as Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th shows, by far the largest group of incarcerated prisoners in what amounts in many cases to a new form of slavery. The criminal justice system in most of the country has never properly served the black population, economic inequity has reached grotesque proportions, and forms of de facto segregation still exist. “One of the features of my community,” Burnett writes in his 1989 essay, “is that it does not have roots; in essence it is just a wall with graffiti written on it” (225). The attempt to exert influence through cinema is inhibited or blocked, not only by the commercial marketplace but also by the larger culture’s systematic attempt to destroy the black consciousness of history and tradition. “The situation is such,” Burnett grimly observes, “that one is always asked to compromise one’s integrity, and if the socially oriented film is finally made, its showing will generally be limited and the very ones it is made for and about will probably never see it” (224).
Even so, Burnett wants to do whatever he can to restore his community’s values and show that “we are a moral people.” This requires, he argues, “humanizing” stories, modern analogs to “the negro folklore which was an important cultural necessity that not only provided humor but was a source of symbolic knowledge” (1989, 224–25). Burnett does not mean “symbolic” here in the way symbolist poets or semioticians do. He means simply that folk wisdom and knowledge are often communicated through the images and actions of stories, and his emphasis on knowledge, especially moral knowledge, is significant because Burnett is in many ways an educator. I have used “symbolic knowledge” in the subtitle of this book as an indicator of what seems to me his primary aim. As we shall see, virtually all his work—even the films set in middle-class environments and modern periods—aspires to the humor, social purpose, and moral lessons of the old folklore. Whatever the style or mode of his films, whatever audience he addresses, whatever production circumstances he works under (they have been various), and whatever degree of artistic success he achieves, he deals with the basic social concerns of America. He offers us a cinematic repository of moral narratives and symbolic knowledge that tries to hold communities together and enable them to endure.
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