Longing, Locomotion, & Los Angeles

A Revest of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep

1971 and the Brit architecture critic Reyner Banham writes “Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape.” This popular belief of Los Angeles as instantaneous, whether architecturally, professionally, etc., is as worn and weathered as any Sunset Boulevard billboard amid this strange inlet of fleeting promise. Enter the long anticipated—thirty years of vaulted existence due to music rights—theatrical release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Mr. Burnett’s 1977 debut is poetry and panorama, its laissez-faire rhythm paced by quotidian quiets and calms, its camera-eye spacing shots of restrictive interiors alongside tumbledown architecture and windswept exteriors. This intimate study of urban poverty and family life in Watts astounds and resonates by deconstructing that glamorous fiction of instant realization, instead elevating those forgotten, perhaps mundane, moments of our lives.

By this I speak of the continual give-and-take struggle of survival—laughter residing within suffering, innocence beside the injustice, a quandary between duty and desire. But prevailing through the gloaming gloom is Mr. Burnett’s notion of faith and family. Killer of Sheep begins in a mysterious family space: an immediate close-up of a boy’s face hearing a father’s admonition for not protecting his brother, soundly followed by a mother’s stinging slap. This boy is the full grown Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and Killer of Sheep is about and is Stan, a drudging, depressed slaughterhouse employee, a man numbed and maimed by society’s numerous obligations and assaults, sure off-screen strikes and slights on his person and psyche. The film’s semblance of a plot revolves around the juxtaposition of Stan’s occupational scenes slaughtering sheep, his occasional interaction with neighbors, and his honorable efforts to maintain a family life against the erosive effects of his abysmal work and dismal future.

What makes the film bearable and tenable—beautiful and transcendent—is the interspersion of idyllic, tender moments with children. Children communicate a hope lost with advancing age, but even the simplistic scenes of throwing rocks, running along rundown rail tracks, or jumping roof to roof are tinged with pain, necessity, and ultimately death, subtly suggesting their grim ensnarement within these modes. Nonetheless, the boys’ black and white leaps of faith from bungalow to bungalow, minute touches of grace and the unmistakable minutiae of hope, are freeing and dreamlike for Stan (and us)—a heartening repose from the repository. Mr. Burnett’s most enviable ability is his presentation of what is and not what was; there is a consistent enduring, an edging forward despite what is left and what lies ahead. Featuring no sex, exaggerated violence, or unrealistic empowerment, Killer of Sheep remains a reaction to 1970s blaxploitation action and its singular retaliations; Mr. Burnett instead relates a realistic urban imprisonment where each person is united, not limited, by their untitled argument against life’s tribulations. In short, Mr. Burnett realizes that life’s problems are not so easily banged away.

The film’s pathos is generated through Stan’s noble attempt to fight the good fight despite his situation’s apparent inescapability; rather than follow the crooked pathways of the local crooks in their instantaneous schemes or yield to the local liquor woman’s sexual advances to work in the backroom, Stan is alike his dulled slaughterhouse instrument drilled to follow an one-way perfunctory passageway everyday. All reel roads lead to the Roman numeral I and the film’s power, with its lack of a payoff plot and heavy-handed didacticism, resides in how each of us relate to those outside of our everyday periphery. It is amidst this strange land of convergent geographies and populaces that Stan is isolated and estranged from society, from his family, and from his own self. Asking for a certain empathy rather than a collective sympathy, the film questions how one moves in this society. According to Mr. Banham, “the local language [of] Los Angeles is the language of movement.” The locomotion that he speaks of is of twofold import, economic and physical, especially in regards to Los Angeles; a simplified equation is necessary for the city’s majesty and magnitude: vehicle = freedom. A central undertaking is Stan and friend’s attempt to secure a car engine, which once arduously gained is absentmindedly self-wrecked. Then is Stan shepherding his own discontent?

Perhaps the best answer lies thirty years prior to thirty years prior. Mr. Burnett’s stylistic predecessors are the Italian Neo-realists with their near documentary aesthetic, non-professional actors, handheld footage, and social commentary. In Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Bicycle Thief, Antonio, with his son Bruno, scours Rome for his stolen bicycle; without his bicycle Antonio cannot transport himself from his current hardship. But what finally causes Antonio to desperately, despite his son’s presence, steal the bike? In a word, poverty, and in two, survival, and if traced these lead to historical/social circumstance. Yet rather than delve into society’s shortcomings— the post-Watts riots, post-Civil Rights milieu providing ample ammo—Mr. Burnett’s film, like Mr. De Sica’s, focuses on how poverty affects people in their domestic dealings. Stan too cannot transport himself, from engine’s destruction to the flat tire ending to a weekend racetrack trip; it is plain that Stan is not unlike the stagnant sheep he slaughters. There is a cruel simplicity and beauty in the uncomplicated starkness of the black and white images, where everything is rendered too black or too white, where the complications come from something unseen like the suppressing societal forces; Mr. Burnett offers no pretension or flash, opting to present the situation as is. Tying the two films are their affecting denouements, where Mr. De Sica and Mr. Burnett offer one final glimpse of faith founded in the strength of familial ties: Bruno grabs his socially condemned father’s hand, while a rare, but genuine smile spreads across Stan’s face as he plays with his darling daughter.

From Paul Robeson to Louis Armstrong, the music invents another layer to the story, whether through irony (Robeson in the slaughterhouse) or illumination (Armstrong urban blues on the freeway). Dinah Washington’s sublime “This Bitter Earth” is twice featured and rarely do sight and sound sync themselves with as much pain and beauty. First appearing during a stunning dance sequence between Stan and his wistful wife (Kaycee Moore), there are obvious problems with this melancholic cue for the couple’s "romantic" moment. But with the world indistinct outside the window, camera low and Ozu-still, their steps traced and retraced, these precious moments of solitude swaying with the song’s simplicity, it seems that this earth, bitter still, may not be so bitter after all. The mastery of its second presence, in the desolate final scene, is that the boundaries between Stan’s despair and his dying dregs of hope become indistinct. Washington croons “if my life is like the dust that hides the glow of a rose. What good am I?” and it is this quintessence of dust and all its restless complication that Mr. Burnett humanely depicts and demands to be recognized.

It is Mr. Sander’s downcast eyes devoid of any doubt of his station that hold and hurt in the theatre and linger and frequent my memory far after leaving it. Killer of Sheep may be an uncomfortable portrait, but it speaks to each individual whose very livelihood devastates his day-to-day life. Whether 2007, or 1977, there is no difference in human truth: the film is a timeless evocation of hopelessness and hope, that distinct human desire for contact, that continual clamor of those underneath. Then like Stan, who constantly rubs his face as if to wake himself from his reality, we will awake years from now realizing that Killer of Sheep is also us.

Fists in the Pocket & shortly, a Certain Familiar Tendency of 1960s Italian Cinema

Dir: Marco Bellocchio, I pugni in tasca, 1965
(This will be the first of a series of film perspectives, a rather peculiar, and not necessarily pragmatic/terribly insightful, passage into classic/contemporary/foreign cinema. Nonetheless, I believe, as Truffaut spoke, that the cinema of tomorrow—and of yesterday and today—will be an act of love and I shall return it.)

Forty years ago or so, a twenty six year old Marco Bellocchio directed his debut movie with:

Lou Castel as Alessandro
Paola Pitagora as Giulia
Marino Masé as Augosto
Liliana Gerace as Mother
&
Pier Luigi Troglio as Leone.

Bernardo Bertolucci proclaimed that this film, along with his own dazzling Before the Revolution (1964), ushered in a new Italian cinema; necessarily the predecessors were unceremoniously slapped in their stagnant faces, the contemporaries lovingly embraced, patted on their pulsating hearts. Bertolucci, in the Criterion afterword to the film, situates the film as “not directly descending from Neorealism” but within Pasolini’s “cinema in prose”—Bertolucci, perhaps vainly but rightly, classifies his own cinema as the “cinema in poetry.” Then within this new Italian cinema, there is already a division, with Bertolucci outlining his affinity for the French New Wave while grouping Bellocchio with Karl Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, and Tony Richardson of the British Free Cinema; in short the whimsy, fantasy, and vivacity of the Nouvelle Vague versus the veracity, brutality, and reality of the Free Cinema.

Let us enter Fists through the notion of “cinema in prose,” where what is starkly said asserts its primacy above how it is said. Then, in its barebones, the strange skeleton of the film violently announces the self-destructive nature and decay of the bourgeois family. The onset of the 1960s was already marked in Italian cinema with Fellini’s (in La Dolce Vita) declaration of destructive decadence, the immoral bourgeois culture accompanied by the dissolution of the family unit; this film of the mid-decade and its groundbreaking view of the family can be measured in its dissonance from another 1960 film: Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. Rocco is another film centering around the fatherless family, the dire, drifting dregs of Fascism; but whereas Rocco sacrifices his own happiness for his family, allowing himself to be physically and emotionally suppressed, Alessandro’s effrontery and calm, caustic machinations assault the very underpinnings which hold him up.


Oh, a basic briefing:
Oldest brother Augosto loves Lucia, planning to marry her and move to the city. With this arrangement, he would leave his three siblings and mother at their rural estate; this burden becomes the sole impediment to the arrangement. Younger brother Alessandro, an epileptic himself, devises a plot to remove not only himself, but his entire dysfunctional family—the blind Mother and epileptics Giulia and Leone. This solitary suicide and multiple murder is not aborted, but forgotten when Alessandro races with another car—essentially a corroboration of life, albeit life on the edge. From this failure, the previously one-sided infatuation that Alessandro has for his sister Giulia begins to develop into an unholy coupling. Soon after, Alessandro, still intent on carrying out his plan, takes his mother to the previously planned place and pushes her off the edge; she plunges to her death. From thereon, Alessandro proceeds to drown Leone and cause Giulia to fall into a coma. The movie concludes with Alessandro’s own seizure and death, believing Giulia to have fallen into a fatal coma.

So here we have the fatherless, and notably nameless (sans surname), family of post-war Italy. We have the angst and anger of Alessandro, the blindness of the helpless and mournful Mother, the conformity and coldness of Augosto, the doleful and distant Leone, the egotistic and enigmatic Giulia. And we have them at their isolated hillside villa, where all about their crumbling compounds are drafts and drifts of bourgeois mentality/society flitting through open windows and emptier corridors, fitting in between the daguerreotypes, old photographs, and general picture prototypes of the traditional weight of a family/Italian history; that is to say that the overfilled walls constantly remind of family and death. This binding burden is compounded by the symbolic, but more importantly physically dependent, handicaps—the Mother’s blindness, the children’s epileptic seizures—which all eventually incite Alessandro to drastic measures. It is after the Mother’s death that the antiquated photographs are smashed, the magazine Pro Familia is burned, the bonfire consuming the past flickering with the frenetic editing and chaotic movement of the camera. The characters then are devoid of bearing, morally or ancestrally, as after this scene there is only the progression towards self-destruction and the corroborating echo of Alessandro and his mother’s final conversation: “Don’t get too close” he cries—to both him and the edge, “it’s dangerous.”

Bertolucci beautifully declares that the lead character of Before the Revolution searches for that “desperate sweetness of life;” he fails to include Fists in this assessment and quite wrongly. For the film, savage and maniacal in its content, beautiful and bare in its execution, does not startle because of what Alessandro does, but for its ability to construe perversity with the front of normality; we cannot help but see each of Alessandro’s actions as in desperate pursuit of Bertolucci’s “sweetness of life,” where his childish convulsions rattle through our still frames. Of course this is all in praise of Lou Castel, the angriest of the young men, whose aggression manifests itself magnificently in little tics and spasms, restrained violence involuntarily displayed before rescinded. The gentleness with which he commits his murders, like Brando cradling those dead pigeons On the Waterfront, the innocuous facades masking injurious intent, are not unlike the seizure he suffers. His and his siblings' seizures equate with their internal emotional and mental paralysis, their innate inconstancy, where they eventually are constrained to nothing but sound and fury, like Alessandro’s final, fatal operatic bellow and echo.

The dance sequence at Giulia’s party is especially dazzling, where the camera—hidden behind a wall, the wall dividing the screen in half (that negative capability)—captures Alessandro sitting alone on a chair against another wall. There is a small slight space in front of him, which, with the rhythm of the music, is filled by men first, then women, both groups from which he is excluded. The camera’s distance here accentuates his loneliness, alike its intimacy at home confessing his desperation for touch. After this dance, an intellectual proclaims “Homo homini lupus,” that man acts like a wolf towards other men, and no one argues.

The fantastic phantoms of two Americans—Brando & Faulkner—haunt the narrative. Alessandro becomes a younger, more perverse Stanley Kowalski, where he violates not only the family, but humanity—matricide, fratricide, incest amongst his ignominious glories. With the constant framing of Giulia beside her bedside picture of Brando (in the Wild One no less), and Alessandro’s gradual transformation into a Johnny, a veritable Marlon Brando italiano, there is, quite blatantly, an unhealthy attraction. The Italian hamlet they inhabit becomes a transatlantic Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s fictional county. Why Faulkner and his county? Because the film's characters, in their incest (Alessandro & Giulia/ Quentin & Caddy), in their mental and physical grotesquery, in the self-destruction of family under the weight of society, mirror those of Faulkner's opus on decay and family, The Sound and the Fury.

The music is by the amazing Ennio Morricone—the maestro of cinema—who scores about one of every two Italian classics, 1960+. The music’s religious undertones, where the perennial tolling of the bells and the choral voices, correspond to the near religious intensity of the characters afflictions, whether with vanity (Giulia), with detachment/loneliness (Alessandro), or with blind devotion (the Mother).

We are kidnapped by this family misfit for society (via Alberto Marrama and his invisible camera that emphasizes the claustrophobic interior, the expansive exterior) and put in the darkest corners of their rooms; no light shall reach us in this dark tale except the ecstatic, frenetic glow of Alessandro’s white teeth wanly gleaming in the still darkening celluloid. Bellocchio knows we will forget ourselves in the darkness.

Timely!

Time magazine, you make me laugh and unpolitely point at the supermarket. Ronald Reagan crying? The only time he cried, he President during Iran-Contra, Reagonomics, Star Wars, Grenada, the Cold War (I'm sure tears ate at Gorbie's conscience, eroded Russian willpower, and eventually straight up melted the Berlin Wall two years after they were shed)-- the Eighties MAN!-- was when he realized he was shot because of Jodie Foster. I mean who would you rather be friends with? I suppose the Great Communicator, and those crazy cover editors of Time, realized the potency and urgency that a solitary, water-soluble, and superimposed tear has upon the public.

Or maybe, foolhardy me, this will be when, seeing a demi-god cry, Republicans will get their act together and ensure that Reagan, and for that matter stalwart Rs everywhere, never have to cry again, never have to even think where they went wrong again, because they will never be wrong again.

Bumpity Bump Bump

Holy Moses! That's what I think and sometimes cry, aloud, when seeing some bumbling, bandwagon, banal or basically beastly bumpersticker in a) plain sight b) rearview c) side glance. It's like staring at the sun; its there and its orange/yellow/black? and it hurts your head. Either way you put it, alphabetically, numerically, or whatnot, its downright dumb to put a bumpersticker on your car. Parents proud of your children? Your children are also proud of you for ruining your $20,000 investment with a picture of an unrealistic lion roaring from an elementary school they went to four years ago, or were expelled from for eating peanut butter in the classroom. Or the "support our troops" or "save animals" or the "green tea ice cream" or you name it: whatever it is, it's detrimental to our health to see these things. But the most catastrophic one? VOTE FOR _____. How embarrassing, defacing not only your name, I don't care who it is because someone's going to want to kill you for voting for said party. Even more embarrassing if, say Humphrey '60 doesn't win, let alone be remembered besides being an eyesore on the I-5. So please, Jebus, please do not, do not put an Obama sticker on your car, not for fearing that he might lose (I'm all for nonsticker presidents, except Teflon), but because it ruins your car, ruins your eyes, and most of ruins your chances of being cool.

Click on the blank for more stickers of winners and losers/candidate brochures since 1960. Or if you're lazy.

GO US! SR!

Nobody did or does propaganda like Russia, though recent production has certainly been down; they simply know the internal tickings and preternatural ticks of the human race better than anyone west of the Urals. The Russians basically set the artistic bar for articulating anti-American sentiment in a little fracas called the Cold War. If anyone says otherwise, they're traitors and shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Alan Whickers &

Life is often better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick; it's basically bees & honey if you ask me. British slang is amongst the greatest gifts our maker-- the human tongue-- has blessed us with (ourselves be praised). So enjoy yourself tomorrow, throw a benny or two and realize that we'll all be old biddies sooner or later: click here or click here.