The film’s action involves several minor characters who provide a relatively broad view of life in Watts. In an early scene, for example, we follow the car that drove past the child and the drunken soldier in the opening shots. Two men are in the front seat, a third is in the back reading a newspaper, and next to him is a young woman wearing a tight miniskirt and a stylish hat. Chattering among themselves with the air of neighborhood hipsters, they’re trying to pool their money to buy a bottle of wine. When they drive up to a liquor store, they encounter two drunken men clumsily fighting in the street, one of whom has been dragged from a shiny Cadillac and appears to be taking a beating. A small crowd has gathered, but neither the onlookers nor the men in the car are inclined to intercede. The young woman in the back seat is curious and concerned. She wants to “see what we can do” because there’s always a chance “something can be avoided.” She steps out of the car and walks toward the fight in her dressy high heels, but she’s ineffectual; as the awkward battle in the street continues, a dandified fellow, maybe a pimp, tries to pick her up. The scene ends with a surreal juxtaposition: a young man and woman on a horse ride up to the Cadillac and watch the clumsy fight.
The film chiefly involves three unemployed male friends who spend much of their day in fruitless or frustrating pursuits. Andy (Andy Burnett) has an expectant wife who keeps their small house in good order despite their quarrelsome marriage; when she tries to watch a snowy TV show, he goes to the record player and jacks up the volume on Dee Irwin’s soulful 1968 hit, “I Only Get This Feeling.” Later, out in the front yard, Andy and his pal Gene (Eugene Cherry) unsuccessfully work on a dilapidated car. Crawling under the vehicle, Andy gets grease and motor oil on himself and remarks that he hasn’t had a bath in some time. Just then a ground-level shot shows a new car pulling up and shiny male shoes getting out, followed by female high heels. The male shoes belong to another of Andy’s pals, Bracy (Charles Bracy, who was Burnett’s classmate in high school and at LACC, and who plays virtually the same loud, boisterous character in Killer of Sheep). The female shoes, one of which slips off a nyloned foot and has to be slipped back on, belong to Sharon, Bracy’s newfound white girlfriend (Donna Deitch, one of Burnett’s UCLA classmates, who went on to become a film director). Sharon asks if she can use the bathroom and goes into the house while the three men stand outside. Bracy boasts that Sharon is a “Hollywood broad” rich enough to own the new car, and proposes that Andy and Gene join him and her along with a couple of her female friends, also “Hollywood broads,” for a hot party that evening. Inside the house we see a brief exchange between Sharon and Andy’s wife: the younger white woman, wearing a silken dress, pauses as she exits and thanks the unsmiling black woman, who is wearing an old frock. Meanwhile, Andy and Gene have more or less agreed to Bracy’s proposal. After Bracy and Sharon leave, however, the two men spend the rest of the day trying to move a washing machine from the front yard into Andy’s small kitchen. When Bracy returns that evening, Andy and Gene are shirtless, dirty, and exhausted. The three gather around the kitchen table, and Bracy loudly complains, “I got a couple of fine broads out there waiting!” The night is ruined, he moans, because Andy has no time to shower and would be “goin’ out stinking like a damned skunk!” Gene quietly defends himself and his friend: “We ain’t hippies, though.”
For Project Three, Burnett wrote, directed, and edited a fourteen-minute, 16mm color film, The Horse (1973), based on one of his unpublished short stories. Compared with his other UCLA films, The Horse is a stylistic anomaly, but it gives clear evidence of his considerable talent as a director of short subjects. The film was shot in the picturesque California countryside of Paso Robles, several hundred miles outside Los Angeles, during a hiatus in the preparation of Killer of Sheep, which had encountered a delay because the actor Burnett originally wanted for the lead role was in prison. In an indirect way, The Horse was influenced by the interconnected stories in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, especially by “The Bear,” which Burnett had dreamed of adapting. “I wanted to do something on [Faulkner’s] personal South,” he told French interviewers in 1990, “where everything is said and explained in a symbolic way” (Kapsis 2011, 48).
The Horse ultimately centers on what at first seems a minor character, a young black boy who witnesses the execution of an ill and dying old horse. Beautifully photographed by Ian Connor, it has minimal dialogue and an evocative sound design by Burnett of birdsong, gusts of wind, the minatory creak of an old windmill, and a few moments of nondiegetic music (Samuel Barber’s musical setting for James Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”). In part because of its brevity and minimalism, one might call it a symbolic film, but only in a qualified sense. Burnett was bemused when some viewers tried to decode the imagery as if they were watching a religious allegory. His symbolism, like that of Faulkner and other modern artists, is entirely in the service of a realist, albeit lyrical and relatively ambiguous, narrative; in other words, the characters in The Horse are representative of a general culture, but the meanings of their behavior are conveyed obliquely, almost mysteriously, through the connotative force and open-ended suggestiveness of images, gestures, and sounds.
The opening shot provides a kind of signifying map for the entire action. From atop a high hill on a clear, sunny day we look down at a distant car moving along a winding, fenced road and turning into the dusty drive of a dark, dilapidated house. The landscape on the far horizon is mountainous, clearly Californian rather than southern, but the decayed house down below suggests a vaguely Faulkneresque world of dead or dying agricultural plutocracy. There are shabby outbuildings behind the house and a large, dry field in front, where we can make out the tiny, isolated figures of a horse, a boy, and a man. The car stops, and three men get out and walk toward the house.
Burnett cuts from this Olympian viewpoint to one of the closest shots in the film: as in Several Friends, he introduces a character by means of a ground-level, tightly framed close-up of shoes, thus conveying information about gender, social class, and aspects of personality. In this case, we see expensive, two-toned Oxfords and Argyle socks. The man wearing them stamps on the front porch of the house, ridding the shoes of dust. Another man, wearing brown dress shoes, goes stomping up rickety stairs to retrieve something from inside the house. Meanwhile, the man out in the field, wearing black shoes, walks back and forth, talking to himself and worrying: “I told them they could have the job. I don’t know. I just don’t know if it’s worth it.” When the fellow who has gone into the house returns bearing a box, Burnett reveals all the characters in the scene: three white men are gathered on the porch, looking out on the field, where a white man paces around restlessly and a black boy in jeans and T-shirt gently strokes a gaunt, sway-backed horse.
Most of the film is devoted to a sinister dead time in which everyone waits for the arrival of something that hasn’t been explained. The three men on the porch are sharply individuated by their looks, behavior, and costume, but none seems interested in being there. One is quiet and white-haired, wearing a rumpled business suit; another is impatient, preoccupied with maintaining the sharp creases in his pants; and a third, wearing denim work clothes, is bored, sitting listlessly on the edge of the porch. The man in the field, who has a brooding, patrician air vaguely like a character such as Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens in Go Down, Moses, walks forward to claim something from the white-haired man and then asks the fellow in denim, “You found a job yet?” “That’s right,” the fellow answers, “you mentioned it yesterday. I’m sorry.” The flashily dressed man walks around a corner of the house to piss and returns to bum a cigarette from the white-haired man. “Ain’t got all shitting day,” he complains. “Where’d that boy come from? Why in hell do we have to wait for some nigger?” The man in denim stretches out to lie on his back. He takes a large pocketknife out of his jeans, opens it, and throws it lightly up to the roof of the porch; the blade sticks in the rotting wood, wobbles, and then falls, barely missing him. “One of these days you’re going to find that thing stuck in