The slaughter of an animal is a key element in the film, functioning chiefly as a kind of metonymic illustration of a society in which the cruelest, most psychologically damaging work is assigned to the poorest and least powerful. The father in The Horse is hired to kill a single animal at a moment when his son happens to be present, but the father in Burnett’s MFA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, which was supported by an L. B. Mayer fellowship and budgeted at roughly $10,000, is hired to kill many animals on an almost daily basis, always out of sight of his family. Killer of Sheep is not only the culmination of a theme that had preoccupied Burnett, but also the climax of his work at UCLA. It was shot during weekends in Watts, using the local kids and other residents as both actors and crew. One of his major achievements and one of the most original American films ever made, it opened the way for his subsequent career.
THREE
Killer of Sheep (1977)
AS THE MAIN TITLE of Killer of Sheep appears over a black screen, a chorus of children’s voices sings:
Lull-a, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a by-by.
Do you want the moon to play with?
All the stars to run away with?
They’ll come if you don’t cry.
So, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a by-by,
In your mother’s arms a creeping,
And soon you’ll be a sleeping.
Just before the song ends we see a tight close-up of a preadolescent boy with tearful, frightened eyes. The song fades into a man’s angry voice from offscreen: “You let anyone jump on your brother and you just stand and watch, I’ll beat you to death!” A slow retreat of the camera reveals a father berating his son: “I don’t care who started what . . . you pick up a stick or a god damn brick!” The father, wearing a wife-beater T-shirt, is ill, fatigued, or maybe drunk; his speech is slurred, and at one point in the harangue he breaks into a coughing fit. Cut to a brief shot of a woman’s torso as she stands in a kitchen doorway embracing a young child, his face buried in her perhaps pregnant stomach. A shot from behind the father shows the frightened son standing quiet, tense, trying to remain expressionless and accept humiliation. “Knock the shit out of whoever is fighting your brother,” the father says, “because if something happens to me and your mother, you ain’t got nobody in the world except your brother!” Cut to a thin old woman seated with her back to us in a poor but brightly lit kitchen, calmly leafing through a newspaper. Return to the father: “And if the son of a bitch is too big for you, come get me! Look, you’re not a child any more. You’ll soon be a god damn man! So start learning what life is about now, son!” The heavy woman exits the kitchen, smiling slightly; behind her, seated in the kitchen, we glimpse a teenage boy. In a reverse angle, the woman walks up to the boy who is being chastised and slaps him in the face. The screen goes black, and the rich bass voice of Paul Robeson sings the same tune we heard at the beginning.
This sequence contains seven shots and five camera setups, most of them close-ups. There’s no establishing shot, and viewers work a bit to determine spatial and temporal continuity. The only dialogue is the father’s angry rant, and some of the shots (the woman holding her child to her belly, the old woman reading a newspaper, and the male teenager glimpsed in the kitchen) generate questions that aren’t answered. Burnett leaves it to us to sort out details and decide how the scene and the people in it will relate to everything that follows. The characters don’t reappear, although some of the players can be glimpsed later in different roles. There’s no causal, spatial, or temporal connection between this and any later scene, and thus the opening of the film takes on thematic or poetic rather than narrative importance. The film deals with the themes it dramatizes: black family life, the growth of black children into adulthood, the problem of becoming a “man,” the relationship between black family and black community, and the chances of black survival in a dangerous world.
A great deal of the film centers on children, because, as Burnett has remarked, “without children, there is no survival. . . . In my community, the most important thing is to survive above all else, and children are taught that they have to support their brother, or their family, no matter what they do. . . . When you’re growing up, it poses some moral problems. You become more and more insensitive: the only thing that matters is survival. This callousness gradually alienates you, distances you from other people and complicates relations in a peculiar way—survival implies a good deal of mistrust—particularly relations between men and women. That’s why I show these children in Killer of Sheep, always there, attentive to what their parents are doing, witnesses of everyday drama” (Kapsis 2011, 8).
Throughout the film, music is as important as imagery. Burnett’s eclectic compilation score ranges from King Oliver to Rachmaninoff but is chiefly associated with African American culture. The song that frames or bookends the opening sequence, called simply “Lullaby” in published credits for the film, is also known as “My Curly Headed Baby,” one of a series of faux “plantation songs” by the classically trained Australian and later British composer George H. Clautsam, who in the early twentieth century wrote light operas and a single movie score. Clautsam’s song was intended to be performed as art music, but its lyrics were written in a crudely phonetic, naively racist, appallingly bad imitation of southern black dialect. Paul Robeson later recorded the song, dispensing with phony dialect and giving the words simple dignity. Burnett’s choice of it is significant, not only because Killer of Sheep concerns black families in Los Angeles who have ties to the Deep South, but also because of Robeson’s historical importance as a black artist, star, and advocate for social progress. (Burnett has long wanted to make a film about Robeson.)
Burnett’s treatment of music differs from a typical Hollywood picture because he seldom mixes it with diegetic sound, thus giving it a degree of independence and allowing it to function as counterpoint or commentary. But if the song at the beginning is intended as some sort of comment on the action, exactly what does it say? Obviously there’s an ironic relationship between the song, which evokes parental love, peace, and celestial beauty, and the scene, which deals with parental punishment, violence, and danger. The song is about a child falling asleep in its mother’s arms, the scene about a boy awakening into the duties of manhood and the imperative of survival; the song is comforting, the scene shocking; the song is dreamlike, the scene harshly realistic. But there’s also a sense in which the song is coterminous with the scene, so that music and image aren’t in complete conflict, and one doesn’t take priority over the other. The song bleeds into the visual action in the form of a chorus of children’s sweet voices and reemerges at the end in the form of a man’s grave bass voice; it joins with and permeates the “plot” of the scene, lingering afterward like a poignant memory or yearning.
Killer of Sheep gradually develops a plot of sorts, made up of a series of vignettes involving the problems of a married black man with two children who works in a sheep slaughterhouse and suffers from