The Genius of Charles Burnett

The staggering image above, evocative of the world of Wyeth but a prelude to a weirder and deeper realm, is the second shot of Charles Burnett's 1973 short The Horse. "If it were a short story by Faulkner, The Horse would have become an anthology piece decades ago; as a short film by an African-American director, it is only now being discovered," Dave Kehr aptly notes in his review of Killer of Sheep/The Charles Burnett Collection in today's New York Times. Sidestepping the fact that the acknowledgement of film's place as an art form commensurate with literature, writer/director Michael Tolkin observed of Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep, "If [it] were an Italian art film from 1953, we'd know every scene by heart." How much guilt one wants to shoulder for the almost criminal neglect of one of America's greatest cinematic poets is not the most pertinent question of the moment, as the two-DVD set of Burnett works that hits the streets next week is a joyous corrective to much of that neglect.

It is also a remarkable conveyor of the sheer range of Burnett's work. Aside from the magnificent Sheep, the restored 2007 release of which I reviewed here, the package includes four Burnett shorts, two (The Horse and Several Friends) being his earliest works, and one, the piquant shot-on-video Katrina observation Quiet as Kept, being his latest. There are also two cuts of Burnett's second feature, 1983's My Brother's Wedding, which failed to find distribution after the festival screening of its 118-minute-version, which occured against Burnett's wishes. The color picture is, early on, more overtly comic than Sheep; protagonist Pierce's exchanges with the often flaky patrons of his folks' dry-cleaning establishment have a consistent deadpan drollery. There's also an ostensibly stronger storyline, as Pierce (Everette Silas) finds himself torn between family obligations—a stint as best man at his brother's nuptials to a real Sugar Hill type—and his concern for a pal about to be sprung from prison. Burnett's 83-minute reedit of the film is tighter, almost ruthlessly so—he kills quite a few darlings in tightening it up, my favorite being Pierce's hilariously haughty future sister-in-law asking him "Would you be a gentleman and get me a glass of water—without putting your finger in it?"

This remarkable image from early in the picture nicely encapsulates the brilliantly deceptive realism of Burnett's visual style. Between the lens and the actual characteristic of the landscape, Burnett manages to lay Pierce out on the sidewalk even as he's standing. The grain and the color and the focus give a quasi-documentary quality...while the composition does something wholly other. Privileged visual moments of this sort abound in Burnett's work. The freedom, the humanity, the sheer strangenes of his movies is immeasurable; I've said it before and I'll say it again, but these are the qualities that make Burnett a kinsman of Jean Vigo.

Comments

[Sam Adams]

Next, please: A domestic To Sleep With Anger.

Glenn, while I agree with you that Burnett finally seems to be garnering the attention and respect he deserves, the fact that I had to wait over TEN YEARS (I just got it in the mail from Netflix and I'm going to watch it tonight) to see Killer of Sheep (1996 was the first time I heard about the movie from a friend of mine in Art School) is a travesty, especially after seeing Southland Tales with my nephew (a Donnie Dorko freak) last night. Hey, Richard Kelly: I read Flow My Tears too. So have about a million other people. But mentioning that you've read PKD does not somehow grant you equivalent status, you lazy-ass mofo. And populating your Methlyn-drenched world with members of SNL would have been mildly edgy back in 1979, when Spielberg did it for 1941, which, now that I think about it, is what your pre-school diorama of a movie most reminds me of. If your going to get all pop-culture-reference-as-a-shortcut-to-deeper-meaning on us the least you could do is cast Eddie Deezen. And stop smoking skunk weed. Funny is not your game.