Killer of Dreams: Looking for Sheep to Count

Paper I wrote for class:
While most people enjoy being told a story, art, even film, does not always seek to tell us one. Sometimes every image is simply placed together to form an idea or theme, or the series of events is merely a portrait of a person, situation, or historical event. In the case of Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett paints the picture of the slum life for African Americans in the late seventies. To do this, Burnett creates a unique, unstructured narrative, and combines it with untrained actors, raw cinematography, and a real setting to convey and comment on the dreary social situation for poor African Americans during this period of history in the United States.
Killer of Sheep is an examination of Watts, a Los Angeles ghetto where the protagonist Stan lives with his wife and kids. The film follows various events that happen in his life and his family’s lives with very little plot structure and a sense of detachment from the rest of the world. The general audience also becomes somewhat alienated since the situation is not one they can directly relate to, nor is there a storyline to pull them in. By making the audience feel this way, Burnett uses the film as a whole to convey that growing alienation within Stan’s character, which is a distinguishing feeling amongst black men of this slum society who could hardly hope for anything better for their families.
During the seventies, African Americans still had to fight for equality in society as the Civil Rights act had passed only in the last decade. To put the setting of the film in a historical context, twelve years had passed since the huge riots in Watts had destroyed much of the area. Economically incapable of rebuilding the area, the film shows the audience still bombed out buildings, piles upon piles of rubble, and ever-deteriorating homes, which no one seemed to have the capacity to overcome or reclaim. Yet, the outside world had moved on and had no interest in these people. They had no ability to escape the past that was present all around them. As shown in many scenes in the film, the majority of the people in impoverished Watts were African American, and were either unemployed, or had a dead-end job with no prospects of getting more money or a better position. This defeating social climate left this rather unnoticed population living day-to-day with hardly a dream of escaping or rising above. The lifestyle presented in Killer of Sheep does gain sympathy from viewers, but there is little to no hope to which the characters can cling or the audience can feel.
The oppressive nature of living in the unchanging society of Watts captured in the film could not have been as effective without Burnett’s choice in doing away with a distinct story. Without a story, the film is static, the characters are stuck, and the audience is forced to analyze what is going on in this time, in this society. They are forced to look at how these people live and what they go through. Even in the alienation of being stuck in a world the audience has probably never experienced without any kind of plot structure, Burnett makes it evident that he wants viewers to watch life in Watts as plainly and truthfully as he can. He offers no solutions to the problems the characters face, but his film does foster discussion of whether there is any hope of a solution for the social situation to which these people are confined.
Along with this lack of a plot, the way Burnett chose to make the movie adds to our experience of the characters’ situations. Within the cinematography aspect of the film, Burnett shot on black and white 16mm film stock, which gives it an older, grittier, feel (not to mention, it was cheaper for him as a student). Black and white, in particular, gave things a stronger contrast and yet a duller view of the world. The film stock Burnett chooses, in a sense, is the pair of glasses the audience is forced to view the world he presents to them. Thus the high contrast black and white image makes one feel that this dreary world is all there is, and this is how it always will be.
In addition to the stock, many of the shots Burnett uses are unique from the mainstream shot-reverse-shot pattern. There are usually very long continuous takes of the children fighting or playing or trying to escape the cruelties in their world. One scene that stood out in this way was the scene of Stan’s daughter in the dog mask. It illustrated the continuous imaginative escapism that the children of the slums were using to cope with the fear and hopelessness of their situations.
While some of his shots were characteristic of being an amateur, Burnett’s mainstream-quality compositional skills enhance this torn-apart world in a way that accentuates the details. In one of the opening scenes where the boys are playing and fighting, the viewer sees the endless rubble in an old train yard that is their playground. Again, while using the world imaginatively, the reality of the situation these kids are in is emphasized by these wide shots. Additionally, shots in the house accentuate the bareness of the walls and rooms, as well as the overall worn-out feel to every part of their home. What little these people had was mostly falling apart to the point of being un-repairable, adding to the overall feeling of oppressive hopelessness.
The scenes in the slaughterhouse with Stan are artistic montages where repetitive shots graphically feature the killing of sheep represent the mundane, yet disturbing and queasy nature of his work. Each shot seemed to add another layer of detachment and resentment to Stan, causing his character to become more and more indifferent to the world. With little money and little dreams for anything better, Stan’s plight is also evident through the shots in the scene where he tries to buy the car motor. Any possible glimmer of hope he had was immediately killed by ignorance and indifference from the people in the society that he is surrounded by, which was emphasized by the final long shot of the motor lying broken in the middle of the street.
Shots of course could not be made without lighting, but Burnett’s use of lighting was minimal to completely natural. If the scene was inside, characters were either lit by the natural light coming through the windows or directly from light sources in the house, such as the overhead light in the nighttime kitchen scene. The use of realistic lighting brings a sense of integrity and simplicity to the characters’ situation. Lighting is not used in the traditional sense of making the characters or setting look good, but rather to objectively paint a world that outside audiences are meant to analyze truthfully.
As far as motifs within these shots and scenes, the killing of sheep over and over again became a metaphor for the reality of the world in which he lives. His dream that there were no sheep there to count illustrates the lack of opportunities to even dream of a better life. In reference to the area of Watts itself, the slaughterhouse effectively represented the violent undertones and oppressive surroundings that seemed to plague their lives. Even if a man did not have a job in a slaughterhouse, this manual factory labor is the only type of job he could truly aspire to have. If a man was unemployed in this environment, then the next best way to make money was to join a gang or resort to some kind of illegal trade, where violence is often necessary. The violence of killing animals for a job parallels the violence of gang killings in Watts. Either way, dead-end blue-collar employment or dead-end unemployment, the film repetitively suggests these people bare the knowledge that life is without hope for positive change.
Another recurring theme intertwined amongst the darkness in Stan’s life is noticing simple moments of beauty. When he holds the coffee cup to his cheek reminding him of the warmth of a woman’s body, or when he dances with his wife slowly in the living room, or while holding his daughter; these tender moments are the only source of escape Stan has from the harsh realities in which he finds himself. The people of the community understand the permanence of their position and must find ways to cope and be content with what live does have to offer them.
Aesthetically, sound design was a somewhat lacking attribute of the film. Audio replaced with ADR from the studio was extremely noticeable as voices felt out of sync with the image. This was not necessarily a huge hindrance since most of the film was without dialogue and much of the dialogue was mostly meaningless. This being true, the lack of meaningful dialogue suggests that what is said between people has no impact; everyone remains rather unchanged by an argument or a dinner conversation. It continues the theme of an oppressed and hopeless society. Other than dialogue, music popular from the time period is what stands out in the film’s sound design. The songs tend to characterize the emotions of whatever is going on in the scene, since the film hinges on these emotions within this particular setting.
Beyond the image and sounds presented, Burnett chose to use mostly inexperienced actors to enhance the realism and honesty of the film. By bringing sincerity to the characters themselves, viewers, while alienated, are sympathetic to them, hoping they might achieve a better life, but then knowing they never will. While this idea might be cynical and depressing to most people, the characters redeem the world they live in with their frank, un-glamorized performances, through the simple action of choosing the higher road (as Stan does in not helping a gang) or seeing the simple beauty of life and imagination in one of the bleakest areas in the country.
To conclude, Killer of Sheep seeks not to entertain us with a story, but to present a realistic view of a marginalized society in which specific characters represent the thoughts, opinions and actions of those who are a part of that society. It presents hard truths of the impoverished lives of people in our country, while showing an underlying theme of pausing for simple pleasures being a way to cope with these truths, as do people in every walk of life. Beyond this, Burnett sought to show another side of the spectrum of African American films, getting away from the Blaxploitation films of the seventies and providing an artistically unique commentary on the social and historical implications of the time. While detached from any kind of story of development, the audience is meant to analyze not only the world on the screen, but also their own world. The film is not there to provide the viewer an escape, but rather to motivate questions. Charles Burnett’s modern approach and deviation from the mainstream white Hollywood cinema may not be much in the way of what people traditionally think of as entertainment, but it historically and socially remarks on the lives of Americans, thus making it an important contribution to the world of cinema. That is why it was one of the first fifty films declared a national treasure and placed in the National Film Registry created by the Library of Congress as part of an effort by the United States to preserve historically important films made in our country.