Associated Press
Charles Burnett has been living with “Killer of Sheep” for more than half a century.
Burnett, 81, shot “Killer of Sheep” on black-and-white 16mm in the early 1970s for less than $10,000. Originally Burnett’s thesis film at UCLA, it was completed in 1978.
In the coming years, “Killer of Sheep” would be hailed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and one of the finest film debuts, ever.
Though it didn’t receive a widespread theatrical release until 2007, the blues of “Killer of Sheep” have sounded across generations of American movies.
And time has only deepened the gentle soulfulness of Burnett’s film, a portrait of the slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his young family in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. “Killer of Sheep” was then, and remains, a rare chronicle of working-class Black life, radiant in lyrical poetry — a couple slow dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” boys leaping between rooftops — and hard-worn with daily struggle.
