The Screengrab : charles burnett

Sun Rises In East, Independent Film Industry Doomed

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs. Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh. This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents. Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention. "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win. We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

Don't get us wrong -- no one is more sympathetic to the Sisyphean struggle of the independent filmmaker than we are, and no one would love to see a true meritocracy in film, where Charles Burnett gets to make any movie he wants while Michael Bay has to work double shifts at the car wash to afford a new fisheye lens. But all this weeping and gnashing and grinding of teeth every few years about how this time, indie film is really and truly doomed, and if you don't make Citizen Kane the first time you step behind a camera you might as well go back behind the counter at Taco Bell not only ignores the reality that determined artists have always found new and innovative ways to get their movies made, but does a disservice to aspiring filmmakers by making things seem even more dire than they actually are.

The Rep Report (August 1--5)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Nobody can accuse Elliott Gould of having micromanaged his career to death. Gould scuffled for work for many years before 1970's M*A*S*H made him not just a star but a counterculture icon and a Time cover boy. Just a couple of years after his anointment by newsmagazine, bad career decisions and personal choices had left Gould with his head in a bad place and reputation for being not just borderline unemployable but, as Pauline Kael put it (not unaffectionately), an "anachronism." These days, Gould is regarded not as a superstar or a flake but a pretty solid pro--okay, maybe a flaky pro--and his best performances particularly the work he did for Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, and California Split, hold up as well as anything done in front of a camera in the 1970s. (His Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, once a lethal flop, is now widely remembered as one of the great comebacks of all time.) "Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age (August 1--21) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music features all those pictures as well as Gould's first significant movie role, as one of the titular quartet in Paul Mazursky's 1969 satirical time capsule Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In an interview in the current issue of Stop Smiling that centers on California Split, Gould calls himself "a jazz actor", and in these musical, improvisationl performances, which have a tossed-off feeling that belies their technical daring and emotional depth, it's easy to see what he means. The program is padded out with other early-'70s pictures that mostly serve to chart the course by which Gould contrived to stay employed in movies between gigs with Bob and Paulie. (The big exceptions are the limper than limp I Love My Wife and the overblown, hollow Harry and Walter Go to New York, which don't serve any purpose whatsoever.) Getting Straight, one of Gould's biggest hits, is a campus-unrest flick directed by Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush that provides a taste of what a thinking-young-person's exploitation movie was like circa 1970. Busting (1974), an attempt to package law-and-order politics in a loose, sort-of-comic Gouldian package, wound up being most notable as the movie that taught Starsky and Hutch how to dress. And Ingmar Bergman's 1971 The Touch, a movie that did Gould no good in any department--it didn't do Bergman any favors either--is worth checking out if you're a Bergman completist or would like to see just why so many people thought that, by that point, Gould had already worn out his welcome.

Starting August 2 and running through most of the month, the Museum of Modern Art's "Collaborations in the Collection" series spotlights Joel and Ethan Cohen, a pair of filmmakers whose collaborative creator was kind of inevitable. But as the programming points up, the Coens have also made a virtue of repeatedly teaming up with those they've done good work with, including cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing) and Roger Deakins (everything else, basically) as well as the composer Carter Burwell and such actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito, and Frances MacDormand, whose collaboration with Joel Coen extended to matrimony.

CHICAGO: At the Gene Siskel Film Center, the 14th Annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video --"The Midwest’s biggest and best celebration of the black experience on film, Black Harvest highlights talent from around the nation and around the world, with a special emphasis on our own Chicago-based filmmakers"--will run from August 1 through the 28th. On August 5, critic and interviewer Elvis Mitchell, last seen on the Turner Classic Movies series Under the Influence, where he barely managed to overcome his shock at hearing Quentin Tarantino confess that he has never seen the Judy Garland A Star Is Born, will swing by with a print of his new HBO film The Black List, Vol. 1 tucked under his arm, and the night after that will include a special screening of the monumental new Katrina documentary Trouble the Waters. A smaller but still very affecting documentary touched by Katrina, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, is also among the many feature films and shorts.

From August 2 through the 24th, the Siskel Center will host "Paradjanov the Magician", a celebration of the vibrantly colored, strange and moving work of the Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov. It includes a new print of his masterpiece, Shadows of Our Fogotten Ancestors.

SAN FRANCISCO: Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, a stunning, black and white semi-documentary look at a group of Native Americans drifting through a dazed, aimless existence in Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, was recently plucked from forgotten obscurity by some hardy restorers and, "presented by" Native American novelist Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett, recently started making its way across the country thanks to Milestone, the same company that brought Burnett's Killer of Sheep back from the dead. It plays the Castro August 1 through the 7th.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives' "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis" (August 1--23) boasts an impressive array of films inspired by the writings of the cult pulp writer. Although Goodis was American and many of the films included here were Hollywood productions, the best known titles are both French: Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), based on Goodis's Down There, which remains one of the freshest and most thrilling products of the New Wave, and Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1983 The Moon in the Gutter, which remains one of the ghastliest things ever brought into the world by the misguided will of man.

LOS ANGELES: August 1 and 2, the Los Angles County Museum of Art presents "Two Comedies by Pietro Germi", and they're the right two: the justly famous Divorce Italian Style (1961) and the even funnier follow-up Seduced and Abandoned (1964), both featuring the luscious comedienne Stefania Sandrelli. The only way to imagine a better package for a hot weekend would be if the museum would spring for a lemonade waterfall.

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

A Top Ten List For Next Year

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By now, even compulsive listmakers like your humble Screengrab staff are getting sick to our bones of year-end top ten lists. We've seen them all, or at least we've seen all the movies that are on them, and you can only hear so many times how goddamn great the Coen Brothers are, even if you really, really believe it. But leave it to Film Threat to come up with one last 2007 recap, and actually make it worth reading: Phil Hall counts down the Ten Best Unseen Films of 2007. (And he's right: we haven't seen any of these).

Each year, for whatever reason, a lot of filmgoers -- even critics, industry types, and other insiders -- don't have the opportunity to see a lot of the films completed and released during that calendar year. Possibly they've only gotten an overseas release, or they're having trouble getting a distrubutor, or they're still making the festival circuit, or they go straight to video or are only available from the filmmaker. (By way of example, two of the Screengrab's favorite movies of 2007 were dated far earlier; the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others, while completed in 2006, only showed in the U.S. at one film festival that year, while Charles Burnett's masterful Killer of Sheep was made over three decades ago but is only now seeing theatrical release due to clearance rights issues and financial problems.) That's why lists like Hall's are valuable; they provide us with a sort of checklist for movies we might likely see in the year or years following for which our eyes should be peeled.

Among the movies he recommends as noteworthy but largely unseen in '07: a computer-animated adaptation of the clever geometric-political allegoy Flatland; Discovering Cinema, a twin-bill documentary about the struggle to bring sound and color to motion pictures; Another Sky, a British period drama from 1954 that received extremely limited theatrical release and is just now being given a deluxe DVD treatment by Facets; Beef: You Are What You Eat, a Troma-esque low-budget horror satire about a cannibalistic serial killer who preys on bodybuilders; and The Tragic Story of Nling, intriguingly described thus: "If Samuel Beckett made animated shorts, he would’ve created something along the lines of Jeffrey St. Jules’ weirdly hilarious of an alcoholic man and a talking donkey plotting to escape a post-apocalyptic garbage dump."

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

Home Video Is Where the Heart Is

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

2007 was a pretty good year for moviegoing, but it may have been an even better one for DVDs. Even the acrimonious racket over the format battles couldn't obscure the almost steady flood of eye-catching product issued on shiny steel discs. For starters, a number of the most exciting new movies of the last twelve months were released in especially fine, often two-disc editions, including Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Host, and Knocked Up in its "unrated, expanded" form. But there's also been a treasure trove of oldies and oddities of every kind, sure to be of interest to anyone who was lucky enough to score a gift certificate or two over the holidays.

CAREER RETROSPECTIVES: While boxes devoted to stars have become a popular scam designed to lump together various heapings scooped from the bottom of the barrel (the "Marlon Brando Collection" is a five-disc set dominated by such least-loved Brando films Teahouse of the August Moon, The Formula, and the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty), a number of director-themed boxes make it possible to have an affordable, one-stop film festival at home. The smartly chosen Viva Pedro--The Almodovar Collection skips past the auteur's tickling juvenelia to the full-blown operatic dementia of his most accomplished '80s work (Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), then bypasses his confused mid-career slump to rejoin him at the mature pitch represented by Live Flesh and All About My Mother. The Documentaries of Louis Malle, a six-disc set released by Criterion through its Eclipse division, is an invaluable compilation of nonfiction films, including his multi-part Phantom India series, by a great director whose reputation may be imperilled by his confounding versatility. In theatrical releases, 2007 was the year that Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep finally breathed pure air, and New Yorker Video/ Milestone is to be congratulated for rising to the occasion and constructing an instant and invaluable box by combining Sheep with Burnett's short films and second feature, My Brother's Wedding, to create Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection. The second volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger captures the cream of Anger's trend-setting experimental shorts, from the 1964 Scorpio Rising to 1981'a Lucifer Rising. For those who crave that kind of transgressive trippiness unpolluted by talent or taste, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky is definitely one of the archeological finds of the year, finally making El Topo and its runtier cousins safe for home viewing. Personally, I kind of think that Jodorowsky was always a con man who hogged the magic mushrooms at the buffet table, but maybe that's why nobody ever invited me to do the midnight programming at the Elgin.

ANIMATION: Is there any pleasure more sublimely twenty-first geeky than trancing out in front of the home entertainment system watching classic 'toons? This year saw the release of a much appreciated fifth volume of Looney Tunes--Golden Collection, but the real shocker may be Popeye the Sailor, 1933-1938: Vol. 1, which rescued a trove of the Fleischer brothers' best from years of rights problems and cheapo videotapes. Then there's Tex Avery's Droopy--The Complete Theatrical Collection, which if anything may be a bit too complete; it contains seven cartoons that Avery purists will shun because they were made by other hands, but they all star the dog who, from the looks of it, spent his screen career stoically suffering for his art. Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika is a four-disc set that will make a perfect May Day present for your old Socialist friend from college who still hasn't gotten over it. Last but not least, there's The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. One: 1934-1936. Technically, the Three Stooges weren't really cartoon characters, but the films are a lot easier to watch if you pretend that they were.

TELEVISION: Yes, you can still watch TV on your TV, and thanks to a few hardy corporations you can even pay for the privilege. Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition performs a notable feat by finally getting the first season (AKA "the good one"), including the feature-length pilot, and the second season (AKA "the not-so-much one") season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's prime time phenom in print and available at the same point in history. Clare Danes fans will be almost as grateful for My So-Called Life: The Complete Series, though some of us would trade all its extras for one bonus scene of the heroine seeing through that smarmy little nimrod Jordan Catalano and leaving him carless in the park stripped to his underwear. That wouldn't have come as any more of a shock than the timely arrival in stores of Saturday Night Live--The Second Season, AKA "Bill Murray: The Pre-Wes Anderson Years, Volume 1." Yes, Virginia, they do still make new TV shows, and of the current series now on DVD, 30 Rock--Season 1 seems particularly well shaped to reward repeat viewings. As show biz self-satire goes, it's not as great as The Larry Sanders Show, but as a DVD it may be less infuriating an artifact than Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show. Here's a series that fully deserves the every-episode-plus-ephemera Twin Peaks treatment, but instead, what do we get? Four discs, consisting of 23 episodes, some of which are already available on the first-season DVD that was first issued back in 2001 and is still in print, plus eight hours of extras that are sort of interesting the first time you watch them and then automatically turn into space that could have been taken up by close to thirty additional episodes. Garry Shandling, if you're reading this, or David Duchovny, if you're reading this and you still have Garry's naumber and can give him a message: It's not right, man. It's just not right. Do you really care this much less about your career legacy than Popeye does!?

SMORGASBORD: Many companies have taken to vaccuuming up odds and ends of film history and boxing them according to genre and sub-genre and even attitude, with results that are fun to contemplate even if you'd rather not shell out something in the high two figures to have them on the shelf. Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, the latest, four-disc set in the series compiled from the American Archives, is a remarkable collection of topical studies, including Cecil B. DeMille's 1928 feature The Godless Girl. Now on its fourth box set, the Film Noir Classic Collection has gone from showcasing movies you'd seen already to movies you'd read about to movies you dimly remember not bothering to stay up to watch after you read about them in the late-night TV listings. As such, it is a veritable overstuffed closet of discoveries waiting to be made, a place to see such actors as Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, and Ricardo Montalban strut their stuff, and to listen to the commentary tracks and give such cool-headed enthusiasts as James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, and Richard Schickel a chance to convince you why you should be watching this stuff. The Cult Camp Classics series slaps together everything from early Sergio Leone (The Colossus of Rhodes) and very late Joan Crawford (Trog), complete with mostly excellent commentary tracks, across four multi-disc boxes divided into such categories as "Women in Peril" and "Terrorized Travelers." The Welcome to the Grindhouse series of double-bill single discs are the most attractive of several packaging jobs that use the supposedly magical word "grindhouse" to offer an excuse to watch movies that Trog crosses the street to avoid be seen with in public.

CRITERION: Still the bestest with the mostest. This year they graced the shelves with dreamy new editions of Breathless, Mala Noche, Two-Lane Blacktop, Days of Heaven, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

DRAGON DYNASTY: Specialists, and the new kid on the block. For years, Harvey Weinstein stormed the festivals, greedily buying up rights to Asian action films, and then lost them in the back of the freezer. This new label, started by the Weinstein Company in association with Genius Products, looks to make amends by issuing such pictures as Jackie Chan's Police Story films, John Woo's Hard-Boiled, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and other action classics including the beyond-canonical 36th Chamber of Shaolin on DVD in deluxe packages far superior to any treatment they've received in the West before now. Indeed, the DVDs are so beautiful that only a churl could think to point out that it's about damn time. It's about damn time.

The Movie Moment: Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett)

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Of all the films to be reissued in 2007, the most important was Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The film finally arrived in commercial theatres after thirty years, having been withheld due to music-rights issues. Killer of Sheep was made while Burnett studied at UCLA's film program, and not having the money to buy the rights to the songs, he included them anyway. With a soundtrack including Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong, Burnett wanted to reflect the diverse history of African-American music in the United States.

Thirty years later, it's as easy to appreciate Burnett's musical choices as it is difficult to picture the film without them, had Burnett decided to cut or change them in order to make the film releasable. One scene that's unimaginable without the music finds young Angie (played by Burnett's niece Angela) playing with her doll while Earth, Wind and Fire's "Reasons" plays on a nearby turntable. Once the song starts, Angie sings to the doll, cheating her way through most of the words. Occasionally, she comes upon a lyric she knows for certain, and once she arrives at the song's refrain, she sits up straight and smiles widely, proudly singing the "la-la-las" with the utmost confidence.

The characters in Killer of Sheep are poor, living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, but poverty doesn't stop the children from having fun in their way. Angie sings her song while playing in a closet, but she couldn't be happier. She looks to be four or five years old, and she doesn't feel a bit self-conscious about her surroundings, or not knowing all the words to the song for that matter.

Throughout the film, Burnett juxtaposes the simple pleasures of the children's games with the harsher realities faced by their parents. In particular, Angie's father Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the titular sheep-killer, is afflicted with a deep despair. Stan's loving wife (Kaycee Moore) tries to help but can't seem to ease his pain. At one point Stan and his wife dance to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," and Stan's solemn expression throughout this scene sharply contrasts with his daughter's wide smile when she sings, illustrating the capacity for joy that can be lost once the responsibilities of adulthood take root.

Killer of Sheep isn't about a plot so much as exploring the lives of its characters. A film like this only works if it feels perfectly natural, and Burnett gives us one scene after another that feels like it's unfolding before our eyes. At least half a dozen moments in Killer of Sheep might have provided fodder for a Movie Moment column: the shot of half a dozen kids piling out of a hole in an abandoned house, a man who smack-talks in rhyme but quickly runs out of words, Stan's wife checking her makeup in a pot lid, and so on. Killer of Sheep is a film to treasure, and its recent arrival on DVD is cause for celebration. — Paul Clark