KILLER OF SHEEP. The best student film ever made? Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) must be one of the top contenders. Its repertory "revival" (after being largely unavailable for years due in part to soundtrack permission issues) takes place on Friday at the IFC Center--fittingly, it overlaps with this season's New Director/New Films series (with the DVD scheduled for November 13, 2007). The screening schedule for Austin, DC, and elsewhere can be found here.

Shot on a low budget in Watts and made as a UCLA MFA thesis film, this black-and-white movie spends about 80 minutes depicting life in an economically depressed American community where the kids are at play but the adults seem overburdened by their bleak milieu.

Burnett's photography carries the film. Watching Killer of Sheep is like viewing a set of intimate community photos (by, say, Diane Arbus and Gordon Parks) magically imbued with sound and motion.

Dialogue is sparse, but the soundtrack enriches the experience in surprising ways. An outstanding example is the use of the Paul Robeson version of "The House I Live In." The song is widely known as a patriotic paean to diversity and tolerance, but here it seems to comment regretfully on the shabby conditions of the houses the characters live in.

I was surprised by how some aspects of the film reminded me of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977)--which, I realized, was made at about the same time. The two films--very, very different in mood--turn out to have much more in common than I would have suspected. And now I notice that J. Hoberman writes, "In retrospect, it can be seen that the two great independent features of the late '70s were Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead." Hoberman also notes, as I did, that "Language police should note that the zesty vernacular includes ample use of the N-word."

Here is the trailer for the re-release of Killer of Sheep.



Source (2:06)


Here is a clip with "After the Love Has Gone" [Crap! It's actually "Reasons"!] by Earth, Wind & Fire.



Source (1:34)


Here is a short trailer for Eraserhead.



Source (00:44)


And here is the Oscar-winning Frank Sinatra version of "The House I Live In." The song is by Abel Meeropol (using the pseudonym Lewis Allan), writer of "Strange Fruit." Bear with the video--and note that the group of kids doesn't seem to be very diverse from an ethnic point of view. That kind of limited message wasn't, apparently, what Meeropol had in mind.



Source (9:59)