KILLER OF SHEEP is part of Charles Burnett retrospective at MoMA
KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, April 13, 4:30
Series continues through April 25
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.killerofsheep.com
In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep will be screening at MoMA on April 13 at 4:30 as part of the series “Charles Burnett: The Power to Endure,” which continues through April 25 with such Burnett films as The Glass Shield (1994), The Annihilation of Fish (1999), America Becoming (1991), To Sleep with Anger (1990), and Finding Buck McHenry (2000), among other works, which include such cast members as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Beau Bridges, Danny Glover, Ice Cube, Margot Kidder, James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Carl Lumbly, Elliott Gould, and Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks.