by Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
In the late 1960s Charles Burnett realized that he wanted to write and direct films about people he knew, about real life, about the dignity and difficulties of the daily struggle to make an honest dollar and hold the family together. A proponent of realism, he became the Gustave Flaubert and Henry James of his South-Central Los Angeles community by creating minutely detailed stories which depict the simple but sometimes heroic acts of people trying to follow a basic moral code, no matter the cost. Most of his characters know right from wrong, not simply because a preacher told them or because they fear the fires of Hell, but because they have lived, observed, thought, and decided that treating others decently is the simplest and best rule for humanity. But circumstances or inner demons won’t always let them follow a simple path of goodness. However, those who stray are often forgiven because of their youth, inexperience, or lack of a clear identity. Rarely will Burnett’s characters be ostracized from the extended family and community. Even though life is rarely easy for these working-class characters, Burnett shows the community-maintaining activities of weddings, mom-and-pop stores, parties, church-going, and funerals. By closely looking at the specific and the ordinary in his characters, Charles Burnett has borne witness to the universal and the extraordinary inherent in all people’s lives.
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on 13 April 1944, Charles Burnett moved to Los Angeles with his family at the same time he was learning to walk. With an extended family including grandparents also in California, he felt like he had never left the South. Many African-American stories and folk beliefs were packed up right along with bed sheets and kitchen utensils for the great trek west. Neighbors in South Central L.A. were likewise recent immigrants from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. Since So-Cal jobs were plentiful during and after the war, especially in airplane manufacturing and factories supplying the military, lots of folks had headed west, secured hard but well-paying jobs, and bought modest homes in neighborhoods where families could be raised.
Growing up in a segregated Los Angeles, Burnett attended the 99th Street School, Gompers Jr. High, and Fremont High School, where his classmates were almost entirely Black and Latino. Los Angeles Community College expanded his world when he found himself in class with a wide range of ages, ethnicities, economic classes, cultures, and human experiences. He explains, “I was in electronics at the time, but I became disenchanted with that because all the people who were in the military-defense industry were coming back to take freshman courses and they’d chat about their experiences and it sounded so dull.” Talk of three-week vacations, job security, and Winnebagos made him opt out of that particular version of the American dream.
Practicing his trumpet and dreaming of taking photographs, he began to consider a career in motion picture photography. He had grown up seeing black-and-white movies at the Manchester and Mayfair theaters in his neighborhood. “I don’t think there was such a distinction between movies for adults and the others then; they were just well crafted. Even B-movies were great.” One film memory that stands out is Jean Renoir’s THE SOUTHERNER (originally released in 1945), the story of a poor white Southern family struggling to get out of working in other people’s fields by owning and farming their own.
To further his own dream Burnett entered UCLA in 1967 to study cinematography and creative writing. USC was closer to home, but as a private school, it was prohibitively expensive. UCLA was far more welcoming: “It was so cheap and much better in a certain sense because you were told to take the cameras out and go make a film and don’t come back with anything we’ve seen before. It was anti-Hollywood whereas USC was so departmentalized and specialized which made it difficult for me.”
One of the few persons of color enrolled in the UCLA film department at first, Burnett was eventually joined by others who shared his desire to explore the means of telling new stories through a camera. When Professor Eliseo Taylor started the Ethno-Communications program, the creative atmosphere began heating up. Serving as a student-teacher, Burnett fully participated in the creation and discussion of films. He had already made a short film in 1969, “Several Friends,” about young people in a South-Central community in search of ways to define who they are. That attitude and uncertainty would eventually lead to the creation of Pierce Mundy and his friend Soldier in MY BROTHER’S WEDDING.
”We had students make movies about their experience. It wasn’t this Hollywood kind of thing or self-indulgent but about a political experience. We had Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Blacks who came through there. That opened the door in a sense and established a political atmosphere. Plus it was a time when there were strikes and a whole bunch of things happening.” These new film pioneers were soon joined by a second wave of students eager to make movies, such as Haile Gerima (BUSH MAMA, ASHES AND EMBERS, SANKOFA), Julie Dash (DIARY OF AN AFRICAN NUN, 4 WOMEN, ILLUSIONS, DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST), and Larry Clark (not the Clark of KIDS, but the director of PASSING THROUGH). Burnett continues, “From that moment on there was a kind of solidarity. One of the interesting things about UCLA was that the Ethno-Communications department philosophy was that you worked in groups, that you helped one another. Everyone was dependent on a group of people that you worked with and helped with each film and vice versa. We crewed for each other. So that was the atmosphere. In class, on campus, and in off-campus cafes the discussions went on: ‘What is Black cinema? What is Black film and how do you distinguish it from anything else?’ After you’d edit and spend time on your film, you’d have after-hour talks and arguments.” That is the ideal way to learn and practice filmmaking.
In an essay entitled “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” novelist Toni Cade Bambara writes of Burnett, Dash, and Gerima during this fascinating and fruitful time at UCLA. She describes some basic tenets that held this group of young filmmakers together – accountability to the community, choosing the community as the training ground for relevant work, focusing on the destiny of their people, reconstructing cultural memory, and having access to world film culture that included Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Those were ideals shared by Charles Burnett, Gerima (from Ethiopia), Dash, Clark, and many of their classmates.
Besides watching and discussing the latest examples of the French New Wave and Czechoslovakian films, the students were further influenced by Eliseo Taylor’s creation of a Pan-African film festival to which were invited various African filmmakers. Burnett also remembers a fellow student named Willie Bell, from the South, who collected old “race movies” [like the 1920s films of Oscar Micheaux and later films intended for Black movie theaters in the South and large cities] and put on mini-festivals to drive home the fact that there was a history of African-American filmmaking, low budget to be sure, but at least preserved on celluloid. Remembering his years at UCLA, Burnett fondly says, “People took the initiative and just created a whole learning center there. It almost sounds like a dream now.”
Remarking on living in the film capital of the world, Burnett explains, “At that particular time Hollywood was totally closed. For people of color there was no chance to get in there. You made independent films, you did the work and got the money yourself, you put the project together and hopefully maybe a company like Churchill might pick it up. You couldn’t get a position [in the studios] until that whole thing with the unions broke down. So, there was never any concern or a desire or dream of working in a studio. You made films because you were crazy enough to get involved and had the dream of thinking you could do something. I think we were our principal audience and so we sort of fed off each other.”
With this amazing foundation in filmmaking technique, theory, and analysis, Burnett and his fellow students went forth to make their own cultural statements. Burnett’s vision was clear: “I began making films wanting to tell a story about all the people I knew and worked with, the problems that they’re facing, and how they were getting on. ... It’s not that I set out purposely to create an alternative cinema. I was just trying to tell a decent story with real people. I think that if people are intelligent characters, that just makes the story more interesting.”
After working on Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama in 1976, Burnett wrote and shot “The Horse,” a metaphorical short meditation on the South and its need for social change. In 1977 Charles Burnett was finally able to make his first feature, KILLER OF SHEEP. This 16mm film, which served as his UCLA thesis, ponders the life of an African-American man who works in a slaughterhouse and dreams futilely of a better life. Declared a National Treasure and added to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress in 1990, KILLER OF SHEEP was shot on weekends for over a year. It was done as a social documentary, as if it had just been captured on film. “The lighting was unglamorous because we were trying to create a documentary look, doing everything in the camera.” In response to accusations of the film being too depressing and downbeat, Burnett has asked why isn’t it considered sufficiently significant and uplifting that some people just struggle and survive and hold on to their values. In an interview with Burnett published in her book, Reel to Real, Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, author bell hooks described KILLER OF SHEEP as a critically existential, reflective meditation on the pathos of working-class Black life in a particular historical moment. As important as Burnett’s film has come to be proclaimed, it didn’t have a theatrical premiere until 2007, 30 years after its completion.
Six years after his feature film debut and after working on other friends’ film projects, Charles Burnett finally found a way to make his second feature. Writing the script for MY BROTHER’S WEDDING was easy because it would concern characters similar to people he knew. He saw the prospective film as “a tragic comedy that takes place in South Central Los Angeles. The story focuses on a young man who hasn't made much of his life as of yet, and at a crucial point in his life, he is unable to make the proper decision, a sober decision, a moral decision. This is a consequence of his not having developed beyond the embryonic stage, socially. He has a distinct romantic notion about life in the ghetto and yet, in spite of his naive sensitivity, he is given the task of being his brother's keeper; he feels rather than sees, and as a consequence his capacity for judging things off in the distance is limited. This brings about circumstances that weave themselves into a set of complexities which Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), the main character, desperately tries to avoid.”
Primary funding for this sophomore film would come from Germany, not the US. After KILLER OF SHEEP won the Critics’ Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1981, Burnett was contracted to make a film for the German public television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (“known for their emphasis on small family dramas”). With that money and additional funding from a Guggenheim fellowship and from Channel 4 (UK), Burnett had $80,000 with which to make MY BROTHER’S WEDDING.
Production began in 1983 and lasted over a year, far longer than it should have, for a variety of reasons and problems. Burnett mixed a few professional actors in with a large cast of non-professionals. As with KILLER OF SHEEP he set the film in the South Central L.A. neighborhood he had grown up in. As he describes his neighborhood: “Growing up, it was a constant clash. If you were from the South, people called you ‘country.’ It was a negative more than a positive. But if somehow you let those [Southern] values seep in, through osmosis or whatever, you look at your life and realize [they are] relevant… In the neighborhood where I grew up, the neighbors were like extended family. That's all missing now — most of it. Los Angeles is so urban now, but it used to be full of vast, open spaces. It was rural — like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn! You could see for miles. City Hall [in downtown L.A.] was the biggest building. You could see the mountains every day. You could have chickens, rabbits, ducks — anything — in your backyard. It was a great place to be at that time. It felt country. There was a sense of community.” (Charles Burnett to James Ponsoldt, Filmmaker magazine)
Unfortunately those community values didn’t exist within Everette Silas, Burnett’s choice for the lead role of Pierce Mundy. Talk, lanky, and good-looking, the novice actor decided he was in a Hollywood production with lots of studio financing and began demanding more money. When he was told that was impossible, he simply walked out. Once a new contract was signed, Silas completed only a few more scenes before disappearing once more, not just from the neighborhood but also from L.A. A few months passed before he surfaced again – now in New Orleans and now an ordained preacher. In so many ways Everette Silas was as irresponsible and unpredictable as the character he was playing. After a year of start-stop-start production, shooting only on weekends since the director, cast, and crew were gainfully employed elsewhere, the filming was completed.
Unfortunately the prolonged production schedule weakened the film in some ways. The actors, especially unprofessional ones, sometimes lost their pacing, their attitude, their understanding or interest in their characters. As in KILLER OF SHEEP, there are some instances in which the dialogue is stiffly delivered by inexperienced actors. Burnett had to make do with what he could get on film. With film being so expensive, he couldn’t afford the luxury of reshooting until the non-actors “got it right.” Nonetheless, Charles Burnett’s first two films contain such a wealth of themes, interesting characters, and extremely insightful moments examining the human condition that viewers tend to overlook any dramatic flaws.
Just as Burnett was getting ready to begin the long process of editing, the German television conglomerate began demanding the final film. He told them he needed more time to finish editing the film, but they demanded to see what he had. So, he sent a rough cut of 110 minutes to Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Instead of respecting Burnett’s need to cut and tighten even further, the producer decided this version was acceptable and entered it into various festivals, including the prestigious launching pad of the New Directors/New Films festival in New York. The response, as Burnett knew it would be, was mixed and no US distributor offered to pick it up for American exhibition. The film disappeared from sight. Film critic Armond White has called this “ a catastrophic blow to the development of American popular culture…. The ‘suppression’ of MY BROTHER’S WEDDING damaged the cultural awareness of American artists (Black and White) who learn from other contemporary achievements… American pop never got the chance to benefit from Burnett’s experimentation and plangent worldview.” Rather than the complex, familial view of South Central L.A. depicted in MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, media images of South Central would soon focus on Crips and Bloods, crack cocaine, urban decay, and riots. Real events exploded into stereotypes of the grossest sort and were used and promulgated by other films, TV shows, rap, and paranoid media. “South Central” became a dangerous place in the American mind, bereft of Burnett’s more balanced view of working people struggling to do right. American media adopted the partial truth and ignored Burnett’s deeper, more widespread understanding of the South Central communities.
For over 20 years Charles Burnett has dreamed of going back and making his version of the film. Pacific Film Archive preserved the long, virtually unedited version of MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, which was, in turn, acquired by Milestone Films. The heroic husband/wife team of Dennis Doros & Amy Heller, who founded Milestone for the exact purpose of preserving and distributing classic, forgotten films, contacted Burnett and made a deal whereby “Burnett and editor Ed Santiago were able at last [to] complete a digital ‘final cut’” of 82 minutes.” Note that the DVD release will contain both the original and the director’s cut for comparison. This new director’s cut is debuting in America this fall and Austin is among the first to show it.
After the tragic non-release of MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, Charles Burnett continued dreaming of new films to make. His tenacity and belief in his vision of preserving his world on film secured more recognition. In 1987 he won the MacArthur award (the “genius award” “for people who show enormous potential in the arts, sciences, and humanities”), and he and his wife Shannon (Sonia in MY BROTHER’S WEDDING) immediately bought a house near where he lived while going to UCLA.
Then in 1990 came his second masterpiece, TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, produced by and starring Danny Glover. An old friend from the South, Harry Mention (Glover), comes to visit Gideon and Susie who live comfortably in South Central L.A. With only some minor family problems, especially with Babe Brother, who has a wife and child, but little sense of responsibility, the family is quite loving and settled. Demon, trickster, or agent of change, Harry brings chaos into the home and nearly destroys them all, but when the mother accidentally sheds blood trying to break up a fight between her warring sons, an epiphany occurs and the family is once more brought back together, stronger than before, chaos their benefactor.
Burnett indicated, “The whole issue I wanted to ask in the film was -- is there evil in the world and in what form and shape does it come? When I was a kid, this sort of thing of people believing in magic and voodoo was so much a part of the environment I came from. When you’re a kid you don’t necessarily believe in it but everybody else does, so it was always a big question. As years go by, somehow or another it comes back on you and you kind of begin to respect it if nothing else.... Harry is based on this folkloric trickster called ‘Harry Man’ so he’s this character that will come and steal your soul. You have to argue or trick him to get it back. Folklore was such a big part of my growing up. At least it was there, people talked about it and told stories.” Burnett wanted TO SLEEP WITH ANGER to serve as a cautionary tale for younger viewers who might follow Babe Brother in an attempt to leave everything behind, including the family and heritage. “When I was growing up there was a sense of family, community, and structure. Without that everything is open for chaos. You don’t have something that kind of glues people together.”
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
This article is based principally on a phone interview with Charles Burnett that I conducted on 10 January 1999, augmented with the cited books by Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks, and updated by information from the Milestone Films website. An earlier version of the article appeared in The Austin Chronicle 15 January 1999.
