Burnett’s central character and his wife have come to Los Angeles from the South and are trying to divest themselves of a “country” background, such as when the father tells his son to stop addressing his mother as “mot dear” (an old expression meaning “mother dear,” made fun of in Tyler Perry’s films about the character Madea), or when his wife admonishes their daughter for going barefoot. He’s a proud man who at one point angrily claims he isn’t poor: he’s able to give a few things to the Salvation Army, he loans or gives small amounts of money to his friends, and unlike another man in the neighborhood, he doesn’t have to survive by eating greens from vacant lots. Even so, he seems perpetually weary and dejected and is unable to make emotional contact with his family. During the film he undergoes a very modest emotional change for the better, but he doesn’t achieve true progress; his day-to-day projects—helping a friend repair an old car, a trip to a racetrack—usually end in frustration, and he keeps the same awful job at the end that he had at the beginning.
This is a film lacking a clear resolution or a strong cause-effect relationship between events, centering on a man whose personal crisis is both economic and psychological. Burnett’s purpose, he has explained, was to depict a character who works in terrible conditions but whose “real problems are within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don’t necessarily win battles; you survive” (Kapsis 2011, 98). Hence, as Manthia Diawara has pointed out, Killer of Sheep almost completely rejects the forward momentum of classic Hollywood and the typical social problem picture, “with its quest for the formation of the family and individual freedom, and its teleological trajectory (beginning, middle, and end)” (1993, 10). Like certain other black independent films, among them Ganja and Hess and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991), its form is “rhythmic and repetitious” and its narrative style “symbolic.” It has something in common with “Black expressive forms like jazz, and with novels by such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, which stop time to render visible Black voices and characters” (Diawara 1993, 10–11).
In more specific terms, Killer of Sheep renders visible the 1970s black community in Watts. Burnett doesn’t show us the area’s most famous landmark: the Watts towers, a notable example of outsider art, constructed by Italian emigrant Simon Rodia in the period between 1921 and 1954. During Burnett’s interview/commentary with Richard Peña on the Milestone DVD of the film, he says he wanted to depict more of the local life in the schools, but was unable to do so. He also doesn’t show us churches; indeed, his central character remarks that he hasn’t been to church since he was “back home” in the South. Burnett nevertheless gives us documentary evidence of the city streets and produces striking images, some disturbing, some beautiful, of a kind that had never been seen in theatrically distributed movies. Most of his large cast was made up of nonprofessionals, including many children, who lived in Watts; some of them had even participated in or been witnesses to the Watts riots. One of his purposes was to encourage local participation and “demystify filmmaking in the community” (Evry 2007), but he also dramatized aspects of daily life he had witnessed, creating a more personal sort of film than the Italian neorealists or the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Like Several Friends, his earlier student film about Watts, Killer of Sheep has a scene that was shot directly behind the house where Burnett once lived (it involves the theft of a TV in broad daylight). He knew people who stored car parts inside their houses to keep them from being stolen, just as a character in this film does; in fact, he once walked into a house and saw the entire front end of a car sitting on the floor. The dangerous games played by young people in the film are the same games he played.
Scattered throughout Killer of Sheep are short scenes of kids playing in the streets and of sheep going to slaughter. Burnett traveled to San Francisco with his lead actor to find a factory that would allow him to document the killing of sheep, which he photographed without the aid of a crew. He shows us ghostlike crowds of snowy ewes; a Judas goat leading the innocent to their deaths; sheep carcasses strung up on hooks and moved down an assembly line for butchery; sheep heads stuck on pikes and stripped of flesh, eyes, and brains; and sheep blood washed from floors. More often, he shows children running and playing their dangerous games in Watts. Boys throw rocks at one another, jump gracefully from rooftop to rooftop, and race bikes down the street chased by angry dogs. Sometimes they torment girls; when a girl in a sunlit, blindingly white dress starts hanging her white laundry on a sagging wash line, boys throw dirt over her and her clean clothes. Occasionally the girls get back at the boys; as a group of preteen girls dance in an alleyway, as a boy riding a bike enters from behind the camera, rides over to the group and shoves one of them, the girls push him, kick him, and break his bike. In another scene, a boy on a porch watches a couple of girls walk down a sunny sidewalk. “Look at them ol’ ugly girls,” he says loudly; the girls shout back “Your daddy is ugly!” and stroll off. “Wanna come here and fight?” the boy halfheartedly yells. In still another scene, a rangy girl climbs onto a rooftop and leads a group of boys in a rock-throwing fight; as she aggressively tosses missiles at kids on the street below, one of the boys on the roof suffers an injured wrist and tries to make his way down, wincing and wiping away his tears.
When the kids aren’t playing, they’re silent, sometimes amused witnesses of rough adult behavior, as when a drunken man in an army uniform is forced out of an apartment by an angry woman bearing a gun. Burnett’s treatment of them has a complex tone, often humorous and remarkably unjudgmental. He never sentimentalizes the children or looks away from their occasional cruelty; at the same time, he repeatedly shows their ingenuity, curiosity, and energy. Manohla Dargis has rightly compared some of his images of kids in Watts to the photos of legendary New York street photographer Helen Levitt, who specialized in still pictures of children’s games. Levitt’s sixteen-minute, 16mm film In the Street (1945–1952), a straight documentary photographed in New York’s Spanish Harlem in collaboration with James Agee and Janice Loeb, has almost no scenes of raw poverty and far less roughhouse play than Killer of Sheep, but it resembles Burnett in its humane respect for the anarchic spirit of children and its awareness of the beauty in their improvised amusements. In Killer of Sheep, children have very few things to improvise with—a few bikes, an old top, a string of unexploded cap-pistol caps, a gum wrapper, a rubber mask, a beat-up white doll—and they often make do with rocks and rubble. Burnett records the meanness of their life, but he observes them with tenderness and wit.
Killer of Sheep isn’t a thesis film that overtly argues for solutions to social problems, but it implicitly compares the children in Watts with the sheep going to slaughter and makes viewers think about what could be done to give them a reasonably secure future. To solve that problem, one needs to confront a wide range of social, political, and economic issues. No doubt Burnett wanted audiences to discuss such things, but his immediate aim as an artist was to objectively dramatize the quotidian struggles of a working-class black family, its attempts to reproduce itself and raise its children against almost impossible odds. Fittingly, he introduces us to the family—Stan (Henry Gale Sanders), Stan’s unnamed wife (Kaycee Moore), Stan Jr. (Jack Drummond), and Stan’s daughter Angela (Angela Burnett, who is Charles Burnett’s niece)—by way of neighborhood children playing daredevil war games in the decaying remains of the Watts rail yard.
The games are gritty and spontaneous looking, staged in a wasteland of dust, dirt, and rocks, but like nearly all the scenes in Killer of Sheep, they were scripted, storyboarded, and guided by Burnett’s unobtrusively poetic feel for space, time, and tempo. He gives them an overarching design, moving from a tightly framed montage of a dangerous rock fight to an exhilarating wide shot of boys running alongside a passing train, and finally to an elliptical series of shots conveying dispersion and restless boredom. As he often does elsewhere, he starts with a close-up—in this case a boy using a piece of plywood or metal as a shield from