Review of the “sheep killer”: side of the 1970s without eyeshadow

For decades, Charles BurnettThe best film was a little more than rumor. Shot the weekend in the early 1970s with a mainly non-professional distribution and a budget that did not reach five figures, “Killer of Sheep” would not receive its first public projection before the fall of 1978 in the New York in Whitney Museum. Playing sporadically only at festivals, colleges and museums, the film failed to obtain a good theatrical outing until 2007, its complicated musical clearances which condemned to darkness. Before that, many of us had never seen “sheep killer” but, in fact, we have still not seen it entirely.

Now, hitting theaters in a magnificent 4K restoration, “Killer of Sheep” is finally complete, with the version of Dinah Washington of “Unforgettable”, which could not be authorized for the release of 2007, returned to the poignant final stretching of the film. Due to its imposing reputation – rented as one of the best films in our city, a characteristic of American neorealism and the summit of the movement of the independent black filmmaker nicknamed the The rebellion – The film can confuse new viewers who assume that all masterpieces must be visionary and visionary totems. Not the case. Some can be soft and tender, listening to everyday rhythms. According to the program notes that accompanied Whitney's first from the film, Burnett sought to “try to recreate a situation without reducing life to a simple plot”. Many little things happen in “sheep killer”, nothing of a lot of consequences. But the enlargement of life itself is deep.

Burnett was a student graduated from the UCLA at the end of the twenties when he shaped his story of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), a husband and father of two children who used a slaughterhouse. His sinister work manipulating dead sheep gives the film his title, but little time has actually passed to Stan's work. These juxtaposed scenes of bleaching livestock and skin carcasses always leave an impression, but it is only a component in a tapestry of threads, none of them gave more importance than the others.

Instead of a conventional story, “sheep killer” presents a mood to us. Stan's face is that of perpetual exhaustion, accompanied by that of his nameless wife (Kaycee Moore), who projects a silent sadness. In the fragments, we have the feeling of a family and the poor community around them. There is a scene in which Stan's friends recruit it without success for an illicit program. In another, Stan and a different friend try to move a heavy car engine on the back of a truck, with comic results. Elsewhere, a white store owner flirts with Stan, suggesting that he should work for her.

Each scene is a small separate episode, but they all connect to the painting and resilience that defines the existence of Stan. Very early on, Stan complains of his misfortunes to his friend Oscar, who replied: “Why don't you kill yourself? You will be much happier.” Stan resists this notion, although he looks at his young daughter wearing a clumsy rubber dog mask, he admits: “I have the feeling that I could hurt someone else.” The tone is more attracted to the bone than threatening, and it transports throughout the “sheep killer”, which does not contain tragedies or major twists and turns, just a non -white removal like his black and white images Shot by Burnett himself, colline the people of the working class.

The deceptive modest approach of the film denies a radical strategy to represent ordinary dark life at a time when such images were barely in abundance. Children's plans throwing the rocks out of the rock trains which pass are Plainspoken, presented with documentary simplicity. And the dialogue is widely functional, Burnett is never built in a great thesis, refusing to reduce the watts to the clichés of the city center or its inhabitants in the holy eyes in the eyes of Biche.

Instead of stereotypes, “Killer of Sheep” offers a discreet Paean to the great migration and to black families who have made their way from the South to Los Angeles, seeking a new start but by finding an inhospitable landing point. With blues, R&B and jazz on the soundtrack (music often expresses the sorrow and the joy that the characters in the bottle), the film is a marvel of accidental beauty, the breathtaking occasional sequence made with a minimum of agitation.

Sanders, who had appeared in some films before “Killer of Sheep”, skillfully plays a man whose depression extends beyond a lack of money. Drifting and emasculated, Stan is less a patriarch than the vanished captain of a flowing ship, drowning his futility. But performance does not allow room for pity, an even more true feat of his Costar Moore, a crucial figure in future films of the rebellion such as “Inje- They Little Hearts” and “Daughters of the Dust.” Moore, who died in 2021, could say everything with a look, and as Stan's wife, she communicates both the disappointment and the solid love that this woman feels for her besieged husband. When she takes a second to examine in the reflection of a pot in a pot, she illuminates so many not appreciated mothers. And when Stan and his wife Slowdance quietly in their living room, made “This Bitter Earth” by Dinah Washington, their brief respite devastates. “Today, you are young,” deplores Washington. “Too early, you're old.

Burnett has selected the songs of his film carefully, organizing a rightly moving counterpoint to his critical portrait of inequality – not only to the country as a whole. The political activist and singer Paul Robeson, who died a year before “Killer of Sheep” was completed, is everywhere in the soundtrack, his booming voice serving as a moral compass, never more than on “the house in which I live”, which hovers on a stage of black children playing in a watts strewn with dirty streets and abandoned buildings. “What is America for me?” Dresses wonders. “A name? A card? Or the flag I see? ” The film poses the same question and dresses provides the answer: “All races, all religions / It is America for me.” “Killer of Sheep” shows us part of this America, the invisible made visible, from the sea to the brilliant sea.