Reviews: "Killer of Sheep," "Fay Grim"
By Chris Wisniewski
“Killer of Sheep” — a classic, restored
Over the past three decades, Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” has become the stuff of cinephile legend. Shot on location in Watts, Los Angeles, mostly with amateur actors, Burnett’s 16mm student-film never received a theatrical release, in part because of the substantial cost involved with clearing its music rights. Despite occasional screenings at festivals and museums in the 30 years since it was finished, “Killer of Sheep” has been nearly impossible for most people to see, theatrically or otherwise, but those who managed to track the film down have been vocal in their praise. A few years after finishing his second feature, “My Brother’s Wedding,” Burnett won a MacArthur genius grant, and in 1990, the National Film Preservation Board selected “Killer of Sheep” for inclusion on the National Film Registry – honoring the rather obscure entry alongside such venerable American classics as “The Great Train Robbery,” “Fantasia,” and “The Godfather.” Yet its reputation as a great film has continued to be just that – a reputation – as “Killer of Sheep” has remained a cause celebre for the lucky few who have actually seen it and a phantom masterpiece for everyone else.
Now that “Killer of Sheep” has finally made its way into theaters in a restored, enlarged 35mm print, it is, without qualification or equivocation, essential viewing for anyone who cares about the cinema as an art form.
[SF360 editor’s note: This story appeared originally in indieWIRE on March 29, 2007. Chris Wisniewski is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, and education coordinator at the Museum of the Moving Image.]
Still, I worry about the outsized expectations that come with thirty years of buildup and the inevitable “it was good, but…” lobby conversations that will surely follow, and I’m loath to simply heap more praise upon it – not that it doesn’t deserve it, but because the film’s brilliance is so singular and modest. In a moviegoing culture that valorizes the contrived self-importance of “Crash” and the glib indie “charm” of “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Killer of Sheep” feels resolutely other, fashioned with an observational, almost verite aesthetic, a loose, episodic narrative, and a complicated, unsentimentalized approach to class, race, and family. Chronologically, it may split the difference between Italian neorealism and Sundance, but cinematically its affinities rest squarely with the former.
Even when Burnett first made “Killer of Sheep,” it was refreshingly out-of-step with the mainstream American filmmaking of the time. “Killer” strikes a startling contrast with the blaxploitation films of the early to mid 70s, presenting a corrective to their distorted depiction of black masculinity. Its protagonist, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), is a slaughterhouse worker who suffers from insomnia and struggles day to day to provide for his wife and children. No smooth-talking detective or renegade outlaw he, Stan exudes quiet dignity and determination, whether he’s scheming to make a bit of money off of a motor or quietly resisting the advances of a grotesquely forward shop owner; he feels human and real in a way that Shaft or even Sweetback never did, though Burnett’s film offers little by way of explicit psychological or narrative context for the character and never grafts a false arc onto his experiences.
“Killer of Sheep” is structured around the repetition of images – children playing in the ghetto, sheep being led to the slaughter – repetitions which serve to visually literalize the pervasive sense of narrative stasis. There are small successes and disappointments along the way, but the film leaves things much as it finds them. This is, after all, observational realism, a film that lingers on small and simple moments. It’s tempting to invoke “the poetry of the everyday” in describing “Killer of Sheep,” just as it’s easy to compare it to neorealism or verite, but Burnett’s haunting visual motifs and his splendid use of music, at once ironic and hopeful, give the film an almost dreamlike texture. In these moments “Killer of Sheep” transcends its realist aesthetic, and, in this transcendence, achieves something heartbreaking and sublime.
“Killer of Sheep” opens Fri/18 at the Castro Theatre.
Sequel rights: “Fay Grim”
(Reprinted with permission, copyright Chris Wisniewski, indieWIRE 2007.)
Hal Hartley’s sequel of sorts, Fay Grim, revisits the memorable characters of the independent filmmaker’s masterful “Henry Fool” (1997). That movie, you’ll recall, left Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) on the lamb and running for his life after a hapless act of heroism left the literary giant manqué wanted for murder. With his brother-in-law’s help and borrowed identity, Henry was seemingly about to board a flight for Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize as the great and controversial poet — Henry’s onetime unlikely protégé — Simon Grim (James Urbaniak).
Now, almost a decade on, the wife and young mother he left behind, Fay (Parker Posey), is worried that 14-year-old Ned (Liam Aiken, reprising his very first screen role) stands in grave danger of turning out like his deadbeat, incontinent figure of a father, the eponymous force who set fresh and unexpected plot in motion in the first picture. She’s at wits end when she discovers two CIA agents in her living room, including a brusque, worldly cynic named Fulbright (played with relish by Jeff Goldblum, a deadpan delight throughout and clearly feeling the part of a Hal Hartley male lead). With the revelation that her schlub of a husband was in fact a master spy whose atrocious confessions are filled with secrets desperately sought by various world powers, Fulbright ropes her into what becomes an arch, immoderately elaborate espionage caper that sends her globetrotting from Queens to Paris and Istanbul. Before that, however, Fay, suddenly of central importance to Central Intelligence and American Foreign Policy generally, leverages her new position to get her brother out of jail (where he landed for his part in Henry’s flight from justice) and pull her family together again, recognizing through budding maternal instinct that, as she puts it to Simon, “Ned needs a father figure or something.”
Although it’s satisfying to see the return of Simon, Ned, publisher Angus (Chuck Montgomery), and of course (late in the movie) Henry himself, this is Parker Posey’s film, and she is at her ironically affected best here, delivering a comically understated
performance astute enough to make us not only laugh at but root for her. Nonetheless, she never quite touches the extremes of vulnerability or passion glimpsed in the volatile Fay of yesteryear. But then the film as a whole, for all its geopolitical scope, as well as the fine off-kilter dialogue and musical score that are hallmarks of a Hartley film, doesn’t have the breadth of the original. In some ways, Fay Grim has more overtly in common with the Hartley films that have come along since “Henry Fool” — the self-conscious play on genre, the Dutch angles and use of still shots, all recall the stylized approach in Girl From Monday or “Book of Life.” A mixed pleasure of a sequel, then, but it’s still hard to imagine not wanting to see installment three.
“Fay Grim” opens Fri/18 at the Embarcadero Cinemas, SF.
topics: independent film, reviews
05.15.2007