Everyone is raving about the film “Killer of Sheep,” a film that has been languishing in obscurity for nearly 30 years. Directed in 1977, by then-UCLA film school student Charles Burnett, “Killer of Sheep” is what critics like to call a poetic meditation on the urban experience in the 1970s. As cliche as that sounds it’s pretty apt. It’s a beautiful, stark film with little or no plot (and that’s more than OK) and just presents life in a dreamy, often melancholic gaze of struggle, hardship and play.
The soundtrack is interesting and notable for many reasons, not the least being that acquiring rights to the film delayed the film’s re-release for much longer than anyone expected.
“We thought it would take about six months to get the music clearances,” Dennis Doro, the films new distributor told the New York Times. “That was six years ago.”
The movie, called a “masterpiece” by the Times — was never meant to be released; this was essentially Burnett’s thesis project, but the film was met with such a powerful response that it wouldn’t die and for 3 decades has been shown only at film festivals and rare student screenings. The film was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, if that’s any indication of how respected it is.
One of the major hold-ups for re-releasing the picture was the Dinah Washington cover of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” which was originally used at the film’s wistful conclusion. The track was much too cost prohibitive and instead, the filmmakers had to recycle Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” — a song that was used earlier in the film in a emotional dance between the sad-eyed protagonist, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) and his wife (Kaycee Moore; both of them first-time actors (the cast is all “non-actors”).
In the end, the music rights ended up costing a whopping $150,000 (this is a small company mind you) and Steven Soderbergh fortuitously gave a gift of $75,000 to help the filmmakers out. That’s some serious patronage of the arts.
Without “Unforgettable,” the context of the ending changes I’m sure (obviously, we’ve never heard the song to picture), but “This Bitter Earth” does work rather marvelously in both places and creates a pretty poignant through line.
Loudmouth Quentin Tarantino apparently was spotted at a midnight screening on Saturday night. Hmm, this is no “Grindhouse,” but I guess he does have an affinity for his fellow African-Americans. It’s playing in New York at the IFC Center and is garnering some of the most ridiculously positive and glowing reviews in recent memory.
Update: Milestone films is putting out “Killer of Sheep” on DVD in November. It will come out as a boxset with other Burnett films including, “To Sleep With Anger,” starring Danny Glover.
Download: Dinah Washington – “This Bitter Earth” (mp3)
Download: Dinah Washington – “Unforgettable” (mp3)
The Times article on “Killer of Sheep” is pretty thorough, though it will expire (as NYTimes articles are wont to do), in a week or so.