This week to the British Film Institute's Southbank Theater comes the legendarily unavailable film "The Killer of Sheep," written and directed by Charles Burnett.

What a wonderful movie.

Not much in the way of story, nonetheless the film has a gaze that's penetrating yet generous to its characters. It was shot in the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s, over a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000. It proceeds through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer growing detached and numb from the toll of working at a slaughterhouse. he finds consolatin in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife to the radio, holding his daughter.

The film won the Critic's Award at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival, but due to legal problems over the use of music in its soundtrack, resolved after three decades only last year, it has rarely been exhibited. In 1990, the US Library of Congress declared it a national treasure and placed it among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance. In 2002, the National Society of Film Critics also selected the film as one of the 100 Essential Films of all time.

One thing I especially loved was the constant stream of oblique glimpses into their lives. Example... filmmakers are always taught to get into a scene quickly without entrances and exits, to begin "in medias res." Burnett, instead, begins one scene with kids in a little handstand competition on their front porch. Clearly they're bored out of their skulls. After a good while of this, the father, coming home from work and in a "mood,' enters the frame, distractedly brushes their hovering feet away from his face, dumping the kids over, and lumbers in the front door. Somehow hilarious, and an entrance invested with so much psychological material. Genius rarely comes so offhand.

- JSL

Further comment on Burnett HERE, on my other site.