KILLER OF SHEEP (CHARLES BURNETT, 1978)
+ RETURN (DAVID GREIG, 1972)
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
4:30 PM
Saturday 02 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:40 PM
Saturday 09 May
Rating: M
Duration: 80 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Jack Drummond
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4:30 PM
Saturday 02 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:40 PM
Saturday 09 May
Rating: M
Duration: 80 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Cast: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Jack Drummond
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – NSW AND VICTORIAN PREMIERE
‘[Killer of Sheep’s] tone is gentle, the style uncoercive, but the movie’s cumulative emotional force astonishes. The scenes seem to have been caught on the fly yet they linger in the memory as if engraved there. It’s a poem that feels like a documentary, and one of the saddest, happiest movies imaginable.’ – Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema
As children play freely in abandoned railyards and apartment blocks nearby, depressed slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two young children eke out a precarious existence in an impoverished neighbourhood in southern Los Angeles. Despite daily frustrations and little hope for a better future, moments of beauty seep in through the cracks.
Featuring a mostly non-professional cast and shot entirely on location, Charles Burnett’s poetic, free-flowing vision of Black working-class life in the 1970s was a landmark in the development of African-American cinema, and remains one of the greatest independent films ever produced in the United States – as recognised in its top 50 placement in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time world critics’ poll.
Introduced by Rob Hughes at Ritz Cinemas and Lido Cinemas.
This program will also screen David Greig’s AFI Award-winning experimental short film Return (1972, Australia, 6 mins).
‘[Killer of Sheep’s] tone is gentle, the style uncoercive, but the movie’s cumulative emotional force astonishes. The scenes seem to have been caught on the fly yet they linger in the memory as if engraved there. It’s a poem that feels like a documentary, and one of the saddest, happiest movies imaginable.’ – Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema
As children play freely in abandoned railyards and apartment blocks nearby, depressed slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two young children eke out a precarious existence in an impoverished neighbourhood in southern Los Angeles. Despite daily frustrations and little hope for a better future, moments of beauty seep in through the cracks.
Featuring a mostly non-professional cast and shot entirely on location, Charles Burnett’s poetic, free-flowing vision of Black working-class life in the 1970s was a landmark in the development of African-American cinema, and remains one of the greatest independent films ever produced in the United States – as recognised in its top 50 placement in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time world critics’ poll.
Introduced by Rob Hughes at Ritz Cinemas and Lido Cinemas.
This program will also screen David Greig’s AFI Award-winning experimental short film Return (1972, Australia, 6 mins).
FILM NOTES: KILLER OF SHEEP
By Anne Rutherford
By Anne Rutherford
Anne Rutherford is a freelance film critic and Adjunct Associate Professor (Cinema Studies), Western Sydney University. She is author of What Makes a Film Tick (2011) and is published widely.
‘With the blues you have layers of meaning. The words say one thing, the way they are sung can say another, and the music always says something else.’ (Keith Mehlinger, 2020)
‘Can a film be blues?’ – Nate Patrin (2023)
Music weaves through Killer of Sheep, a presence as alive, complex and multi-valent as any of the human characters. Music is a conduit to a quality of feeling that seeps into the narrative vignettes, blending into, amplifying and at times contradicting dramatic scenes. Charles Burnett orchestrates these two different modes of feeling – musical and dramatic – in an episodic structure that creates more a story field than a linear narrative per se, the music as much a part of the story world as the dramatic scenes.
The film opens on a woman’s voice crooning a lullaby over a black screen, as the titles fade up: ‘La la la la la la la la bye-bye, do you want the stars to play with.’ Cut abruptly to a big close-up of a young boy’s face, full of consternation, as his father scolds him harshly: ‘you let anyone jump on your brother again and you just stand and watch, boy, I'll beat you to death.’ The darker, resonant baritone of Paul Robeson takes up the lullaby which, permeated and twisted by what we have just witnessed, takes on an entirely different mood. Ironic counterpoint sets the tone for the multi-layered play between music and narrative that follows.
Burnett wanted Killer of Sheep to be like a history of Black music in the US, particularly the blues he grew up with, redolent with lived experience transported from the South in the Great Migration of African-Americans to the west coast, layered with the melancholy of poverty and disadvantage but also tempering hardship with the pleasures of rhythm, melody and deep feeling. (see Burnett’s episode of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: ‘Warming by the Devil’s Fire.)’
The film is set in the Watts neighbourhood of L.A. where Burnett grew up, site of the 1965 Watts rebellion against police brutality and racism and still bearing the scars of that uprising. Burnett talks about how much he liked the people in his neighbourhood and respected them for what they had gone through: people who worked hard but were never given their due.
The narrative revolves around Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his wife (Kaycee Moore), their kids and friends, and the hardscrabble life of the neighbourhood. Stan works in an abattoir, herding sheep into the slaughter room, stringing them upside down on meat hooks, flaying them, and slinging the carcasses along rails into the processing machines. The slaughterhouse is awash with grey tones, broken only by the metallic glint of steel hooks, workbenches and butchers’ knives being sharpened, the soundscape swept into the plodding beat and at times discordant jazz falls of William Grant Still’s ‘Afro-American Symphony.’ The metaphorical resonance of these sacrificial lambs is not lost.
At home, Stan’s relationship with his wife (unnamed) seems stuck. He can’t sleep and his care-worn face carries the struggle to maintain some sense of self and to get ahead: the myth of Sisyphus was Burnett’s template. Don’t be lured, though, into thinking this is a film of despair. There are sensuous moments of great tenderness between Stan and his wife. Humour erupts into the film, prefiguring Burnett’s absurdist humour in The Annihilation of Fish (1999); a profound humanism gives dignity and agency to his characters, as in his To Sleep with Anger (1990). The vibrant world of the kids plays out under bright, wide-open skies, their rough play rambling across rubble-strewn vacant lots and derelict building sites, accompanied ironically by Robeson’s ‘What is America to Me.’ Film preservationist Ross Lippman writes, ‘the way that the film shows beauty in the midst of despair reminds me of the great Thelonious Monk song, ‘Ugly Beauty.’
As a student at UCLA, Burnett was part of a group of young African-American filmmakers known as the L.A. rebellion. Other students, he says, were ‘making films about flower children, hippies and nudity,’ while he and his friends debated what a Black film should be, how to represent working class African-Americans in a way that did justice. In the ethos of the Civil Rights movement, they felt a responsibility to counter the racist stereotypes of Hollywood, and rejected the Blaxploitation films of directors like Marvin van Peebles. Burnett wanted to go back to films made by and for Black people in the ‘30s, like the work of Oscar Michaux.
The group refused the Hollywood modes of representation. They were influenced by Latin American “Third Cinema” and Black British filmmakers. Inspired by his teacher, documentarist Basil Wright, Burnett adopted the semi-documentary aesthetics of the Italian neo-realists. He shot on location with a fluid handheld camera, only filmed things he’d seen in the neighbourhood, used mostly non-professional actors (his friends). Critics wrote:Killer of Sheep ‘may be the closest American cinema ever got to capturing the same feeling as Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Mehlinger)’; ‘if [it] was an Italian film made in 1953, we would have memorised every scene’ (‘On Story 613,’ Austin).
Burnett wanted the film ‘not to have perfect lighting’, to look like he ‘had just captured things offhand’ (‘On Story’), ‘like a loosely shot film with a narrative that sort of evolves, (Mehlinger), even though it was fully scripted and shot with astute attention to cinematography. The restoration preserved the rough quality of the cinematography.
Killer of Sheep was ‘one of the first films in which European audiences saw a sensitive, un-condescending portrayal of a Black family’ (Bérénice Reynaud, in Mehlinger). According to actor/director Ava DuVernay, ‘Charles Burnett has made the Black community visible and he has been visible to the Black community. [He has] been a giant to us, a legend to us, an icon’ (Governors Awards, 2017). The restoration has cemented Burnett’s reputation as one of the greatest of American directors.
Despite winning the Critics’ Prize at Berlin Film Festival in 1981, Killer of Sheep did not get theatrical release. Without funds, Burnett could not clear the music rights and, at the time, Black films were screened mostly in churches and school gyms. As Burnett told Robert Townsend (2019), ‘if you were Black you were left out in the cold.’
‘Can a film be blues?’ – Nate Patrin (2023)
Music weaves through Killer of Sheep, a presence as alive, complex and multi-valent as any of the human characters. Music is a conduit to a quality of feeling that seeps into the narrative vignettes, blending into, amplifying and at times contradicting dramatic scenes. Charles Burnett orchestrates these two different modes of feeling – musical and dramatic – in an episodic structure that creates more a story field than a linear narrative per se, the music as much a part of the story world as the dramatic scenes.
The film opens on a woman’s voice crooning a lullaby over a black screen, as the titles fade up: ‘La la la la la la la la bye-bye, do you want the stars to play with.’ Cut abruptly to a big close-up of a young boy’s face, full of consternation, as his father scolds him harshly: ‘you let anyone jump on your brother again and you just stand and watch, boy, I'll beat you to death.’ The darker, resonant baritone of Paul Robeson takes up the lullaby which, permeated and twisted by what we have just witnessed, takes on an entirely different mood. Ironic counterpoint sets the tone for the multi-layered play between music and narrative that follows.
Burnett wanted Killer of Sheep to be like a history of Black music in the US, particularly the blues he grew up with, redolent with lived experience transported from the South in the Great Migration of African-Americans to the west coast, layered with the melancholy of poverty and disadvantage but also tempering hardship with the pleasures of rhythm, melody and deep feeling. (see Burnett’s episode of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: ‘Warming by the Devil’s Fire.)’
The film is set in the Watts neighbourhood of L.A. where Burnett grew up, site of the 1965 Watts rebellion against police brutality and racism and still bearing the scars of that uprising. Burnett talks about how much he liked the people in his neighbourhood and respected them for what they had gone through: people who worked hard but were never given their due.
The narrative revolves around Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his wife (Kaycee Moore), their kids and friends, and the hardscrabble life of the neighbourhood. Stan works in an abattoir, herding sheep into the slaughter room, stringing them upside down on meat hooks, flaying them, and slinging the carcasses along rails into the processing machines. The slaughterhouse is awash with grey tones, broken only by the metallic glint of steel hooks, workbenches and butchers’ knives being sharpened, the soundscape swept into the plodding beat and at times discordant jazz falls of William Grant Still’s ‘Afro-American Symphony.’ The metaphorical resonance of these sacrificial lambs is not lost.
At home, Stan’s relationship with his wife (unnamed) seems stuck. He can’t sleep and his care-worn face carries the struggle to maintain some sense of self and to get ahead: the myth of Sisyphus was Burnett’s template. Don’t be lured, though, into thinking this is a film of despair. There are sensuous moments of great tenderness between Stan and his wife. Humour erupts into the film, prefiguring Burnett’s absurdist humour in The Annihilation of Fish (1999); a profound humanism gives dignity and agency to his characters, as in his To Sleep with Anger (1990). The vibrant world of the kids plays out under bright, wide-open skies, their rough play rambling across rubble-strewn vacant lots and derelict building sites, accompanied ironically by Robeson’s ‘What is America to Me.’ Film preservationist Ross Lippman writes, ‘the way that the film shows beauty in the midst of despair reminds me of the great Thelonious Monk song, ‘Ugly Beauty.’
As a student at UCLA, Burnett was part of a group of young African-American filmmakers known as the L.A. rebellion. Other students, he says, were ‘making films about flower children, hippies and nudity,’ while he and his friends debated what a Black film should be, how to represent working class African-Americans in a way that did justice. In the ethos of the Civil Rights movement, they felt a responsibility to counter the racist stereotypes of Hollywood, and rejected the Blaxploitation films of directors like Marvin van Peebles. Burnett wanted to go back to films made by and for Black people in the ‘30s, like the work of Oscar Michaux.
The group refused the Hollywood modes of representation. They were influenced by Latin American “Third Cinema” and Black British filmmakers. Inspired by his teacher, documentarist Basil Wright, Burnett adopted the semi-documentary aesthetics of the Italian neo-realists. He shot on location with a fluid handheld camera, only filmed things he’d seen in the neighbourhood, used mostly non-professional actors (his friends). Critics wrote:Killer of Sheep ‘may be the closest American cinema ever got to capturing the same feeling as Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Mehlinger)’; ‘if [it] was an Italian film made in 1953, we would have memorised every scene’ (‘On Story 613,’ Austin).
Burnett wanted the film ‘not to have perfect lighting’, to look like he ‘had just captured things offhand’ (‘On Story’), ‘like a loosely shot film with a narrative that sort of evolves, (Mehlinger), even though it was fully scripted and shot with astute attention to cinematography. The restoration preserved the rough quality of the cinematography.
Killer of Sheep was ‘one of the first films in which European audiences saw a sensitive, un-condescending portrayal of a Black family’ (Bérénice Reynaud, in Mehlinger). According to actor/director Ava DuVernay, ‘Charles Burnett has made the Black community visible and he has been visible to the Black community. [He has] been a giant to us, a legend to us, an icon’ (Governors Awards, 2017). The restoration has cemented Burnett’s reputation as one of the greatest of American directors.
Despite winning the Critics’ Prize at Berlin Film Festival in 1981, Killer of Sheep did not get theatrical release. Without funds, Burnett could not clear the music rights and, at the time, Black films were screened mostly in churches and school gyms. As Burnett told Robert Townsend (2019), ‘if you were Black you were left out in the cold.’
FILM NOTES: RETURN
By Geoff Gardner
By Geoff Gardner
| Geoff Gardner is the Chair of the Cinema Reborn Organising Committee. |
Return was made with funds from the Experimental Film and Television Fund, established in 1970, as a result of a recommendation in a report on the future of the Australian film industry, written by Barry Jones, Phillip Adams and Peter Coleman. Between 1970 and 1978, the Fund, administered by the Australian Film Institute, supported some 828 projects, about a quarter of which were so-called “experimental.”
The Fund’s beneficiaries included a range of filmmakers, including Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, Dirk de Bruyn, Paul Winkler, Jeni Thornley, Albie Thoms and Peter Weir. After studying at Australia’s first film school at Swinburne in Melbourne, David Greig was one of the earliest recipients of production grants and was funded to make three films – Return (1972), Witness, (1973) and Ceremony (1974-75).
Return was Greig’s first film, winning an AFI Award in 1973. The film opens with ultra-crisp black-and-white photography. A bug scoots across the rotting weatherboards of an old, deserted farmhouse. Mournful music, disembodied voices on the soundtrack. The sounds of nature butting in. Signs of abandonment – broken windows, boarded up doors. The past and present collide. A hooded figure appears … the images become more abstract, the cutting more frenetic. A haunting evocation of the past that lives on in places and objects, it ends with the dramatic compression of time into one single leaf.
Greig had absorbed the tropes of experimentalists around the world, such as Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. He was free to be playful and obscure, free to relish wild and beautiful, increasingly abstract, black-and-white images, free to exhilarate in extravagant camera movement and enigmatic storytelling.
Greig’s experimental films screened at the Melbourne and Sydney Filmmakers’ Cooperatives, and he went on to edit for other filmmakers and produce, direct and edit many documentaries at Kestrel Film Productions in Melbourne.
The Fund ended in 1978; its activity was absorbed into the newly-created Australian Film Commission. The days of experiment, spontaneity, exhilaration (and working for nothing for the love of movies) came to an end.
The Fund’s beneficiaries included a range of filmmakers, including Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, Dirk de Bruyn, Paul Winkler, Jeni Thornley, Albie Thoms and Peter Weir. After studying at Australia’s first film school at Swinburne in Melbourne, David Greig was one of the earliest recipients of production grants and was funded to make three films – Return (1972), Witness, (1973) and Ceremony (1974-75).
Return was Greig’s first film, winning an AFI Award in 1973. The film opens with ultra-crisp black-and-white photography. A bug scoots across the rotting weatherboards of an old, deserted farmhouse. Mournful music, disembodied voices on the soundtrack. The sounds of nature butting in. Signs of abandonment – broken windows, boarded up doors. The past and present collide. A hooded figure appears … the images become more abstract, the cutting more frenetic. A haunting evocation of the past that lives on in places and objects, it ends with the dramatic compression of time into one single leaf.
Greig had absorbed the tropes of experimentalists around the world, such as Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. He was free to be playful and obscure, free to relish wild and beautiful, increasingly abstract, black-and-white images, free to exhilarate in extravagant camera movement and enigmatic storytelling.
Greig’s experimental films screened at the Melbourne and Sydney Filmmakers’ Cooperatives, and he went on to edit for other filmmakers and produce, direct and edit many documentaries at Kestrel Film Productions in Melbourne.
The Fund ended in 1978; its activity was absorbed into the newly-created Australian Film Commission. The days of experiment, spontaneity, exhilaration (and working for nothing for the love of movies) came to an end.
THE RESTORATIONS
Killer of Sheep
Source: Kino Lorber
Digitally restored to 4K and remastered by UCLA Film & Television Archive, Milestone Films, and the Criterion Collection. Restoration supervised by Ross Lipman and Jillian Borders in consultation with Charles Burnett.
Director, Producer, Screenplay, Photography, Editor: Charles Burnett; Sound: Charles Bracy; Additional Sound: Willie Bell, Andy Burnett, Larry Clark, Christine Penick // Cast: Henry Gayle Sanders (Stan), Kaycee Moore (Stan’s wife), Charles Bracy (Bracy), Angela Burnett (Stan’s daughter), Eugene Cherry (Eugene), Jack Drummond (Stan’s son).
USA | 1977 | 80 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | English | M
Return
Source: David Greig
Return has been restored by Piccolo Films from the original 16mm camera reversal and digital audio components.
Director, Producer: David Greig.
Australia | 1972 | 6 mins | B&W | English | M|
Source: Kino Lorber
Digitally restored to 4K and remastered by UCLA Film & Television Archive, Milestone Films, and the Criterion Collection. Restoration supervised by Ross Lipman and Jillian Borders in consultation with Charles Burnett.
Director, Producer, Screenplay, Photography, Editor: Charles Burnett; Sound: Charles Bracy; Additional Sound: Willie Bell, Andy Burnett, Larry Clark, Christine Penick // Cast: Henry Gayle Sanders (Stan), Kaycee Moore (Stan’s wife), Charles Bracy (Bracy), Angela Burnett (Stan’s daughter), Eugene Cherry (Eugene), Jack Drummond (Stan’s son).
USA | 1977 | 80 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | English | M
Return
Source: David Greig
Return has been restored by Piccolo Films from the original 16mm camera reversal and digital audio components.
Director, Producer: David Greig.
Australia | 1972 | 6 mins | B&W | English | M|