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TWO

Beginnings

BURNETT WAS BORN IN VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, on April 13, 1947, but when he was age three, as part of a diaspora of blacks from the Deep South who were seeking employment in West Coast industries, he and his family moved to Watts in South Central Los Angeles. The area takes its name from a farmer who bought a small amount of acreage in 1886 and sold it when it was about to become an important railroad hub (the Watts train station is a historic landmark). The earliest population was made up of Hispanic rail workers and black Pullman porters, but in the 1940s a huge number of southern blacks moved to Watts to raise families in specially built housing projects. Los Angeles was blatantly racist, and many black people in Watts were confined to their neighborhood. Yet there was work to be had in the community until the early 1960s; in the summer, for example, the young Burnett could get jobs with carpenters or construction crews.

By the mid-1960s the railroad was rusting away, the heavy industry was gone, and much of the black population had become grimly poor. In 1965 the Watts riots broke out: a chaotic explosion of violence prompted by the arrest of a single youth by the California Highway Patrol after years of systematic police brutality against residents. (The young man’s name was Marquette Frye, and he and Charles Burnett had been in junior high school together.) In the mid-1970s, at the time when Burnett made Killer of Sheep, Hispanic gang culture was on the rise, stimulated by the growing drug trade, but it was not until the late 1980s that the notorious battles between the Bloods and the Crips made Watts a war zone. The warring factions signed a peace treaty in 1992, the same year as the Rodney King riots. By that time many poor blacks were moving back to the South, and Chicanos were becoming a larger presence in a community of mostly single-parent families who lived in rented housing.

Burnett was raised chiefly by his mother and grandmother. His father joined the military and was seldom seen. “He didn’t have any impact at all,” Burnett told Manona Wali in 1988 (Kapsis 2011, 15). His mother, who worked as a nurse’s aide, left home at four in the morning and usually didn’t return until evening; therefore, his grandmother quit her job and watched over Burnett, requiring him to go to church before she would let him go to the movies. He never became truly religious, but his grandmother’s sense of right and wrong was a lasting influence. Her love of spirituals, together with his mother’s love of blues, eventually shaped his taste in music. As a child he learned to play the trumpet and became interested in photography and films. The “race” pictures of Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams predated this period and were no longer available, but he saw old adventure serials, Universal horror films, and Tarzan movies. He remembers that he and his friends cheered when Tarzan wiped out a whole village of black warriors (Kapsis 2011, 16).

Like most boys in Watts, Burnett had to learn boxing as a survival skill, but at least he didn’t have to worry about armed killers or dangerous drug addicts (Kapsis 2011, 14). He managed to stay relatively clear of gang activity and unlike some other kids never became an alcoholic or a pill popper. In high school he grew increasingly aware of institutionalized racism because of the way teachers tacitly assumed their students were never going to amount to anything and tried to shove boys into shop class. (They resembled Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who in 2015 argued that affirmative action should be overturned; the poor black students, he said, should go to schools where grading was less strict.) After graduation, partly because he wanted to avoid being drafted into the military, Burnett earned a practical degree in electronics from Los Angeles Community College (LACC). He soon realized, however, that he was never going to be happy in a technical job. Fortunately, while at LACC he took a writing class taught by Isabelle Ziegler, who became the next major influence in his life. Her students were working class, experienced, and aspirational; Ziegler had them read widely in European and American literature and write short stories, novels, and plays. Burnett has recalled that she asked him, “‘What is your ax to grind?’” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 74).

Although Burnett had become interested in photography while in high school, the only motion picture lens he could look through was attached to an old 8mm movie camera owned by a friend. He remembers using it once to photograph an airplane in the sky as it approached Los Angeles International Airport. For a while he considered becoming a photojournalist. “I spent time at the library looking at old black and white photos of people and events,” he told me. “I wanted to capture what was going on in my community. I bought an old 35mm still camera and went out immediately to start documenting things. . . . The first thing I came upon was a lady who had died of an overdose lying in the doorway of an apartment. Police were standing around keeping people away, but they didn’t bother me when I started taking pictures of the lady. When I had to stop to change film I stood under a tree on the sidewalk reloading. A young, attractive teen-age girl who had cerebral palsy slowly made her way up to me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She stopped in front of me and very politely asked me why I was taking pictures. I didn’t know what to say. I said something stupid, like, ‘Oh, for fun.’ She said to me, you take pictures of tragedies for fun. I put my camera away, and that was the end of my attempt at photo journalism.”

He was much happier in Ziegler’s class. Intellectually curious and possessed of an artistic temperament, he got a night job at the main branch of the LA public library and began going to movies in his spare time. As he grew older, the first film he saw with which he could identify in a strong personal sense was Robert M. Young and Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man (1963), a love story about a railroad section hand and a preacher’s daughter, which deals intelligently with conflicts of both class and race and features an exceptional music score by Motown artists. In 1980 Burnett told a French interviewer that he especially admired this film because it was about “a young man and his wife working hard to survive in a racist environment. The movie is full of anger but without hate” (Kapsis 2011, 3–4). Other films he liked when he was young (all of them re-releases) were Delmer Daves’s The Red House (1947), a rural melodrama about class tensions; Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A. (1950), a noir thriller with documentary footage of San Francisco streets; and especially Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), a harsh but lyrical film about the lives of dirt-poor southern tenant farmers. At least one critic has compared Burnett to Renoir, because both men are skilled directors of ensembles who tend to give all the characters their reasons (Kim 2003, 8–9). What Burnett especially admired about The Southerner was its tendency to treat all the poor with equal dignity: “They were all sharecroppers, white and black, and sharecropping was hard for everyone. The rich landowners were the ones who benefited. Not the poor whites who were fighting for the same scraps from the master’s table. Renoir showed it” (Kim 2003, 9).

The 1960s were at least in some ways good years for the arts in the black community of Los Angeles. “The Watts Writers Workshop [inspired by Malcom X] was booming,” Burnett told an interviewer. “Until—it was rumored—an FBI informant burned it down” (Kapsis 2011, 16). Burnett wasn’t involved in the workshop, but he had a growing awareness of the political determinants of life in Watts and was preparing to examine that life through writing and filmmaking. It was against this background that he gained admission and financial support to study film at UCLA, an inexpensive school at the time, with $15 per quarter tuition for in-state residents. Burnett enrolled in 1967, earning a BA in theater arts and creative writing in 1971 and an MFA in 1977. One reason for his long stay there was that he could make excellent use of UCLA’s free cameras and equipment, and he became important as a student instructor. He had arrived at the right moment. While at the university he was a leader and facilitator of what was arguably the most important black cultural formation in the United States since the Harlem Renaissance.

THE L.A. REBELLION

In those days Los Angeles was, and to a considerable degree still is, an unofficially segregated city, but Burnett found the atmosphere in Westwood strikingly different from the world he had known in Watts, which resembled a semirural extension of the black South, or what he described as a “displaced” community. One of his strongest memories as a schoolchild was when his teacher wrote “poor,” “middle class,” and “rich” on a blackboard and asked the students in which category they belonged. Burnett assumed he was middle class, but the teacher told him he was poor; he had never seen life outside his neighborhood and didn’t know his own condition.

It would have been difficult for him to acquire that knowledge, because Watts was rather like an apartheid area in lockdown. As a teenager Burnett was occasionally stopped by members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as he walked down the street; his pockets were searched, and had he been carrying as much as a seed of marijuana, he would have gone to jail (Martin and Julien 2009, 23). At UCLA in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, he moved freely and lived in an apartment where the hallways were filled with the smoke from burning joints. “I was terrified,” he recalled. “But the campus police would pretend like nothing was going on” (Martin and Julien 2009, 23). Some of his anxiety was well justified. In 1970 he was mistakenly arrested and held in jail for a weekend because he had been traveling in an automobile that was used in a robbery.

During those years antiwar protests were spreading, feminist and black-power rebellions were gaining media attention, and the impulse toward national liberation was taking root throughout the “Third World.” At the same time, the civil rights movement and affirmative action were helping make institutions like UCLA somewhat more multiracial. There were nevertheless potentially explosive relations between privileged white students and students of color. In 1968, a year after Burnett’s arrival, a small group of students and faculty formed the ad hoc Media Urban Crisis Committee (MUCC, also known as the “Mother Muccers’) and staged a series of protests that caused the university to establish a pilot program in “ethno-communications.” As David E. James has explained, this program, which began with thirteen students from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds and remained important not only for blacks but also for Asians and Chicanos, “was modelled on the film school’s main production training, which required a number of 8 and 16mm shorts, followed by a thesis film, and the production courses were supplemented by seminars on Third World aesthetics and community involvement. Elyseo Taylor, a former U.S. Army cinematographer and one of the first blacks hired in the film school, played a leading role, and Charles Burnett, one of the few blacks in the film school proper, was engaged as a teaching assistant” (2005, 304).

Elyseo Taylor was a key figure in the education of Burnett and other black students, among them Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Julie Dash, Jamma Fanaka, Haile Gerima, Ali Sharon Larkin, Barbara McCullough, and Billy Woodberry. He was already training teenagers in Watts in amateur filmmaking, and at UCLA he taught a course called Film and Social Change that was especially important for Burnett because its objective was “to get people of color to tell stories about their community” (Kim 2003, 9). Taylor’s seminars in Third World aesthetics, and similar courses later taught by Teshome Gabriel, introduced students to the twin manifestos of Latin American “Third Cinema”: Glauber Rocha’s (1965) “Aesthetics of Hunger” and Julio Garcia Espinosa’s (1969) “ For an Imperfect Cinema,” both of which argued that revolutionary, socially liberating films made by and for oppressed people must willingly embrace the standards of low-budget production, avoiding slickness, spectacle, and the formulas of commercial entertainment. (As Rocha put it, “Wherever there is a filmmaker prepared to stand up against commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique, there will be the living spirit of Cinema Novo.”) Taylor hosted a campus visit by Ousmane Sembene and a delegation of visiting African filmmakers and showed students examples of “imperfect cinema” by such committed Latin Americans and Africans as Rocha (Black God, White Devil [1964]), Sembene (Black Girl [1965]), Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Barren Lives [1963]), and Fernando Solinas (Hour of the Furnaces [1968]).

In 1971 Taylor directed Black Art/Black Artists, a fifteen-minute color documentary about black painters that suggests the kinds of ideological and aesthetic issues he was discussing with his students. Centering on a museum exhibit of black painting and fine art in Los Angeles, the documentary is backed by jazz and blues music and features offscreen commentary by Van Slater, a political activist, woodcut artist, and teacher at Compton Community College. Slater argues that the 1960s were the beginning of “black art that represents a black point of view.” In the nineteenth century, he points out, black painting in the United States was technically indistinguishable from white painting and was largely overlooked, and in the period of the Harlem Renaissance it was preoccupied with modernist depictions of nightclub highlife—the sort of thing that white patrons found more appealing than, say, paintings of black families and children. Middle-class blacks, Slater observes, tended to purchase black art that had been approved by white critics. True black art, he insists, would emerge only when it began to reflect the ideas and full experience of black people. Such art, whatever forms it might take, could embrace different ideas or attitudes: if two black artists looked at the same dying neighborhood, for example, one might see beauty in decay and the other might see evidence of a failing society.

Partly as a result of exposure to these ideas, Taylor’s students began to assume an activist, adversarial role in the film program. Willie F. Bell, a black student from the South, curated a series of films by Oscar Micheaux, a director Burnett had never heard of and was excited to discover. When a white teacher wanted to avoid talking about “sociological” aspects of Birth of a Nation and concentrate on formal matters, Haile Gerima and Francisco Martinez carried him bodily out of the classroom and took over the discussion. But at least one white teacher was a positive influence: Basil Wright, a pioneer of the British documentary movement, taught a course that Burnett took early in his student years and greatly admired. Wright had been chiefly responsible for Nightmail (1936), the most famous of the British General Post Office films, which has a poetic-realist quality enhanced by W. H. Auden’s verse narration. Wright’s somewhat earlier Song of Ceylon (1935) especially impressed Burnett; neocolonial in politics, it nevertheless has a quietly subversive attitude toward the alienated labor of colonial subjects, a sensitive feeling for daily life among poor Sri Lankan families, and a lyric imagery of children at play. Wright was a fine writer about film (he succeeded Graham Greene as the film critic for the London Spectator and wrote two film books, The Use of Film [1948] and The Long View [1974]), but most important, Burnett has said, he gave the students in his classes a conviction that “‘one had to approach filmmaking from a humanistic point of view’” (quoted in Klotman 1991, 95). Burnett also recalls being introduced by Wright to Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose globe-hopping career began with semiabstract, avant-garde experiments in montage and led to politically radicalized films that mixed newsreels, reenactments, and on-the-spot footage. Like Wright, Ivens was a social activist (he was blacklisted in the United States in the early 1950s) who was possessed of a lyrical temperament. Whether he was exploring the condition of Belgian coal miners (Borinage [1934]), the daily life of U.S. rural families in the Great Depression (Power and the Land [1940]), or Vietnam’s revolution (the collaborative Far from Vietnam [1967]), his work had an aesthetic sensitivity to movement, light, and photographic texture.

At UCLA Burnett studied languages (French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish), read Georg Lukács and Frantz Fanon, and immersed himself in production. In those days the film school was relatively open to experiment and less geared toward Hollywood than its equivalent at the University of Southern California, which saw itself as a feeder for the industry. The year after Burnett arrived, and when “ethno-communications” was born, Francis Ford Coppola received an MFA from UCLA for You’re a Big Boy Now, which served as a calling card for his subsequent Hollywood career. But students in Westwood, especially the black students, weren’t expected to follow Coppola’s path. The school didn’t court the studios by creating specializations in producing, directing, writing, or cinematography, and students weren’t taught how to get agents or pitch projects; instead they learned the entire movie technology and often shot films on the streets, recruiting amateurs for their casts and crews. In a 1994 interview with Aida A. Hozic, Burnett looked back on the important education he had received in those years and lamented how much things had changed:

If you go [today] to UCLA where everyone is nineteen years old, has seen the same movies, and has the same background, you cannot learn anything from each other. It is no wonder that the kids can only think of selling movies. . . . People are not interested in talking about issues. I have been lecturing at colleges and find it very frustrating. The kids just want to earn a certain number of credit units. It is maddening. At UCLA, the students are not interested in experimenting; they want to learn how to write these very slick movies. When I was going to school . . . one of the great things was that you better not come back with a film that was a cliché or ordinary or something that someone had seen before. . . . It was very competitive in this sense: people were afraid of sharing their ideas and they guarded them like babies. And if you worked on something, you did not do it because you needed a job—you just did it because you had a passion for it. But now, God, I was over there and I was so disappointed. I felt raped. (Kapsis 2001, 84)

Out of the freewheeling, politically aware atmosphere at UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of U.S. black independent filmmaking emerged. (At roughly the same moment, a smaller manifestation of black cinema was developing in New York, beginning with Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess [1973] and culminating in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground [1982]; see Klotman 1991.) Historians initially referred to the UCLA group as “the Los Angeles school,” but as a result of a 1984 retrospective organized by Clyde Taylor at the Whitney Museum, it came to be known as “the L.A. Rebellion.” Burnett was at its forefront, directing his own films and serving as a kind of mentor for Woodbury, Dash, and Larkin (Larkin dubbed him “the professor”). This is not to say, however, that he was the leader of a homogeneous collective or conscious movement. The UCLA group was composed of individual artists with their own interests and was no more stylistically cohesive than a group like the French New Wave had been (in retrospect, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and the others in this group are quite different from one another). Unlike most movements, it never promoted itself via a journal or a manifesto, and when its work was first shown outside the walls of UCLA, it didn’t give itself a name. The “Rebellion” might have had somewhat greater success if it had done these things.

Burnett and his cohort eventually achieved significant recognition at European film festivals, where motion pictures were recognized as art. His early work won prizes in Berlin and at a 1980 Paris retrospective of “black independent cinema,” where his films were shown alongside those of Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, and William Greaves. A French interviewer asked Burnett if he belonged to a kind of new wave. He responded, “No. We’re not a single school of filmmakers sharing the same ideas. We are very independent. The only points we have in common is that we are Black and we feel close to the Third World” (Kapsis 2011, 3). In 1991 he told Berenice Reynaud much the same thing. He had stayed in touch with other filmmakers from UCLA, “But it wasn’t a rebellion. Clyde [Taylor] and I argue about his use of the term. When we went to UCLA, we tried to form groups at different times to facilitate filmmaking. But it wasn’t a ‘school’ of Black filmmakers, or a conscious effort. Things just happened” (Kapsis 2011, 57; for Clyde Taylor’s view, see “Once Upon a Time in the West . . . L.A. Rebellion,” in Field, Horak, and Stewart 2015, ix–xxiv. See also two other essays in that volume: Chuck Kleinhans’s retrospective commentary on the L.A. formation in light of subsequent changes in black cinema and its audiences [57–82] and Michael T. Martin’s essay on what he prefers to call “the Los Angeles Collective” or “L.A. School” [196–224]).

Like most other members of the UCLA group, Burnett had no wish to become a Hollywood director; indeed, he had no plans for a career. Much of his work was fashioned in a rough, “imperfect” style that paradoxically required great artistic judgment and considerable technical skill. He eschewed the “well-made” narratives of both commercial and certain types of social realist pictures. Too many films of the Left, he argued, “‘would present an abstract worker against management. . . . They had this sort of A-B-C-D quality—that if you do A and B, then C would follow’” (Kapsis 2011, 6). In contrast, he emphasized the domestic sphere and the relatively subtle things that happen between people in everyday life. Reacting against cause-effect plots, he avoided stories about growth, change, and the resolution of conflict. Instead he concentrated on the pressures that poverty exerts on families and friendships and the struggle of black families to exist with dignity; as he put it in an interview with Michael Sragow, using a language that has come to be identified with the “survivalist” branch of black sociology, he was trying to depict situations in which “you don’t necessarily win battles; you survive” (Kapsis 2011, 98).

Burnett and the other black filmmakers of the “L.A. Rebellion” were nevertheless recognizable as a distinct cultural formation, and like any cultural formation in modern society, they tended to define themselves in opposition to an established standard. The Italian neorealists had been against glossy studio films, the French New Wave against “the tradition of quality,” and the Latin American and Third Cinema movements against all forms of Western cultural imperialism. Burnett’s group had something in common with all these formations, but Burnett and most of his fellow students reacted more specifically against the blaxploitation pictures of the early 1970s and the films about black gangsters that appeared intermittently in US theaters over the next two decades. The short-lived blaxploitation cycle, prompted by the runaway success of three historically significant black-directed films—Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1971), and Superfly (1972)—was exactly contemporary with Burnett’s years at UCLA and spawned several B-picture, action-genre vehicles for black actors (The Legend of Nigger Charley [1972], Black Caesar [1973], Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off [1973], Blacula [1973], The Mack [1973], The Black Godfather [1974], etc.). Popular with certain black audiences and promoted as if blacks had created them, some of these films were in fact produced, written, and directed by whites, and their gestures toward social rebellion tended to be confined chiefly to the image of the hero as outlaw and superstud. All of them had the sensational qualities of traditional exploitation cinema and resembled what could be called a hustler’s version of the cinema of poverty. They confirmed Burnett’s deepest distrust of Hollywood. As he later declared, “The studios are not interested in depicting life in a realistic way. Films create myths about black people. . . . I think that the studios project this image of being really what they’re not, sort of liberal institutions. . . . Most of the films they show are action-packed dramas about drugs and so forth. . . . The only perceptions these people have of us are basically drugs and mothers who prostitute themselves” (Kapsis 2011, 71).

The UCLA group’s characterization of its blaxploitation “other” was somewhat oversimplified, and the question of what constituted black cinema was debated for many years afterward (for a recent, postmodern example, see Gillespie 2016). Nevertheless, unlike a later generation of more commercially oriented black directors that includes Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Carl Franklin, Burnett and his cohort avoided making films about dope dealers and gangsters. (One exception to the rule was Jamma Fanaka, but his films can be viewed as critical of blaxploitation; see Horak 2015, 119–55.) Instead they made antigenre films about racism, police brutality, sexual stereotyping, and the quotidian experience of black people. Some of their early films were striking for the way they deliberately broke the formal rules of continuity editing and conventional screenwriting.

PROJECTS ONE, TWO, AND THREE

Like everyone in the production school at UCLA, the black students had to fulfill three filmmaking assignments. Project One, for which the individual student acted as writer/director/photographer/editor, was a short film in 16mm or Super 8, without synchronized sound but with the possibility of magnetic stripe. (Magnetic stripe, or “mag stripe,” is a strip of recording tape attached to one edge of a roll of film, allowing for music and post-synch sound, but requiring a special projector.) Project Two was a longer 16mm film with synch sound, made in collaboration with other students. Project Three was a short film with synch sound.

Unfortunately, Burnett’s untitled Project One (1968) has been lost. Allyson Field, who researched all the Project One films made by the black students, has found that it was shot with a Bolex camera, a Switar lens, and 8mm Kodak color. (See Field’s excellent essay on the Project One films by the students of color, who deliberately set out to “unlearn” the usual codes of narrative cinema, in Field, Horak, and Stewart 2015, 83–118.) Michael Cummings, a friend of Burnett, played a black painter who strangles his white model after making love to her. This plot sounds uncharacteristic of Burnett; it may have owed something to the combined influence of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, the latter of which, with its essay “White Woman, Black Man,” was published during Burnett’s first year at UCLA.

In chapter 1 I described the opening scenes of Burnett’s Project Two, the 16mm, black-and-white, twenty-nine-minute Several Friends (1969), which is a more ambitious and original film, signaling a major talent. It, too, deals with interracial sex, but it has a looser, less goal-directed narrative; episodic in structure, it was originally planned as a feature-length picture and resembles a trial run or preparatory experiment for Killer of Sheep. Like Killer, it was shot in a poor area of Watts using local players and documentary-style photography (the photographer was Jim Watkins, but the compositions are Burnett’s). It shares two actors with the later film and has the same affective mixture of grimness, humor, and melancholy. It even has a few incidents that seem to foreshadow Killer: a butcher kills, plucks, and strings up the carcasses of chickens; two men spend a good deal of time trying to repair an old car; and the same two men struggle to move a large machine into a house.

The film’s action involves several minor characters who provide a relatively broad view of life in Watts. In an early scene, for example, we follow the car that drove past the child and the drunken soldier in the opening shots. Two men are in the front seat, a third is in the back reading a newspaper, and next to him is a young woman wearing a tight miniskirt and a stylish hat. Chattering among themselves with the air of neighborhood hipsters, they’re trying to pool their money to buy a bottle of wine. When they drive up to a liquor store, they encounter two drunken men clumsily fighting in the street, one of whom has been dragged from a shiny Cadillac and appears to be taking a beating. A small crowd has gathered, but neither the onlookers nor the men in the car are inclined to intercede. The young woman in the back seat is curious and concerned. She wants to “see what we can do” because there’s always a chance “something can be avoided.” She steps out of the car and walks toward the fight in her dressy high heels, but she’s ineffectual; as the awkward battle in the street continues, a dandified fellow, maybe a pimp, tries to pick her up. The scene ends with a surreal juxtaposition: a young man and woman on a horse ride up to the Cadillac and watch the clumsy fight.

The film chiefly involves three unemployed male friends who spend much of their day in fruitless or frustrating pursuits. Andy (Andy Burnett) has an expectant wife who keeps their small house in good order despite their quarrelsome marriage; when she tries to watch a snowy TV show, he goes to the record player and jacks up the volume on Dee Irwin’s soulful 1968 hit, “I Only Get This Feeling.” Later, out in the front yard, Andy and his pal Gene (Eugene Cherry) unsuccessfully work on a dilapidated car. Crawling under the vehicle, Andy gets grease and motor oil on himself and remarks that he hasn’t had a bath in some time. Just then a ground-level shot shows a new car pulling up and shiny male shoes getting out, followed by female high heels. The male shoes belong to another of Andy’s pals, Bracy (Charles Bracy, who was Burnett’s classmate in high school and at LACC, and who plays virtually the same loud, boisterous character in Killer of Sheep). The female shoes, one of which slips off a nyloned foot and has to be slipped back on, belong to Sharon, Bracy’s newfound white girlfriend (Donna Deitch, one of Burnett’s UCLA classmates, who went on to become a film director). Sharon asks if she can use the bathroom and goes into the house while the three men stand outside. Bracy boasts that Sharon is a “Hollywood broad” rich enough to own the new car, and proposes that Andy and Gene join him and her along with a couple of her female friends, also “Hollywood broads,” for a hot party that evening. Inside the house we see a brief exchange between Sharon and Andy’s wife: the younger white woman, wearing a silken dress, pauses as she exits and thanks the unsmiling black woman, who is wearing an old frock. Meanwhile, Andy and Gene have more or less agreed to Bracy’s proposal. After Bracy and Sharon leave, however, the two men spend the rest of the day trying to move a washing machine from the front yard into Andy’s small kitchen. When Bracy returns that evening, Andy and Gene are shirtless, dirty, and exhausted. The three gather around the kitchen table, and Bracy loudly complains, “I got a couple of fine broads out there waiting!” The night is ruined, he moans, because Andy has no time to shower and would be “goin’ out stinking like a damned skunk!” Gene quietly defends himself and his friend: “We ain’t hippies, though.”

For Project Three, Burnett wrote, directed, and edited a fourteen-minute, 16mm color film, The Horse (1973), based on one of his unpublished short stories. Compared with his other UCLA films, The Horse is a stylistic anomaly, but it gives clear evidence of his considerable talent as a director of short subjects. The film was shot in the picturesque California countryside of Paso Robles, several hundred miles outside Los Angeles, during a hiatus in the preparation of Killer of Sheep, which had encountered a delay because the actor Burnett originally wanted for the lead role was in prison. In an indirect way, The Horse was influenced by the interconnected stories in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, especially by “The Bear,” which Burnett had dreamed of adapting. “I wanted to do something on [Faulkner’s] personal South,” he told French interviewers in 1990, “where everything is said and explained in a symbolic way” (Kapsis 2011, 48).

The Horse ultimately centers on what at first seems a minor character, a young black boy who witnesses the execution of an ill and dying old horse. Beautifully photographed by Ian Connor, it has minimal dialogue and an evocative sound design by Burnett of birdsong, gusts of wind, the minatory creak of an old windmill, and a few moments of nondiegetic music (Samuel Barber’s musical setting for James Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”). In part because of its brevity and minimalism, one might call it a symbolic film, but only in a qualified sense. Burnett was bemused when some viewers tried to decode the imagery as if they were watching a religious allegory. His symbolism, like that of Faulkner and other modern artists, is entirely in the service of a realist, albeit lyrical and relatively ambiguous, narrative; in other words, the characters in The Horse are representative of a general culture, but the meanings of their behavior are conveyed obliquely, almost mysteriously, through the connotative force and open-ended suggestiveness of images, gestures, and sounds.

The opening shot provides a kind of signifying map for the entire action. From atop a high hill on a clear, sunny day we look down at a distant car moving along a winding, fenced road and turning into the dusty drive of a dark, dilapidated house. The landscape on the far horizon is mountainous, clearly Californian rather than southern, but the decayed house down below suggests a vaguely Faulkneresque world of dead or dying agricultural plutocracy. There are shabby outbuildings behind the house and a large, dry field in front, where we can make out the tiny, isolated figures of a horse, a boy, and a man. The car stops, and three men get out and walk toward the house.

Burnett cuts from this Olympian viewpoint to one of the closest shots in the film: as in Several Friends, he introduces a character by means of a ground-level, tightly framed close-up of shoes, thus conveying information about gender, social class, and aspects of personality. In this case, we see expensive, two-toned Oxfords and Argyle socks. The man wearing them stamps on the front porch of the house, ridding the shoes of dust. Another man, wearing brown dress shoes, goes stomping up rickety stairs to retrieve something from inside the house. Meanwhile, the man out in the field, wearing black shoes, walks back and forth, talking to himself and worrying: “I told them they could have the job. I don’t know. I just don’t know if it’s worth it.” When the fellow who has gone into the house returns bearing a box, Burnett reveals all the characters in the scene: three white men are gathered on the porch, looking out on the field, where a white man paces around restlessly and a black boy in jeans and T-shirt gently strokes a gaunt, sway-backed horse.

Most of the film is devoted to a sinister dead time in which everyone waits for the arrival of something that hasn’t been explained. The three men on the porch are sharply individuated by their looks, behavior, and costume, but none seems interested in being there. One is quiet and white-haired, wearing a rumpled business suit; another is impatient, preoccupied with maintaining the sharp creases in his pants; and a third, wearing denim work clothes, is bored, sitting listlessly on the edge of the porch. The man in the field, who has a brooding, patrician air vaguely like a character such as Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens in Go Down, Moses, walks forward to claim something from the white-haired man and then asks the fellow in denim, “You found a job yet?” “That’s right,” the fellow answers, “you mentioned it yesterday. I’m sorry.” The flashily dressed man walks around a corner of the house to piss and returns to bum a cigarette from the white-haired man. “Ain’t got all shitting day,” he complains. “Where’d that boy come from? Why in hell do we have to wait for some nigger?” The man in denim stretches out to lie on his back. He takes a large pocketknife out of his jeans, opens it, and throws it lightly up to the roof of the porch; the blade sticks in the rotting wood, wobbles, and then falls, barely missing him. “One of these days you’re going to find that thing stuck in your forehead,” the flashy man says.

The wind blows, the windmill makes creaking sounds, and the black boy in the field keeps stroking the flanks of the old horse. Who are the white men on the porch, and what exactly is their relationship to one another? The film avoids answering but makes them seem old acquaintances, forming a strange, uneasy fraternity. As dusk approaches, they fall silent. In a wide shot we see the lights of a vehicle approaching down the long road to the house. It’s an old dump truck, driven by a black man. When he arrives, the boy leaves the horse and runs joyfully to him, meeting his embrace. He’s the boy’s father (played by Larry Clark) and the figure everyone has been awaiting. The white man in the field removes a revolver from an oilcloth, loads it, and gives it to him. The irony of the situation is now evident: the boy’s father has been hired as the horse’s executioner, and the relatively well-to-do white men have been concerned about whether it was worth hiring him. For the first time, the film takes the boy’s point of view. In close-up, he holds his hands over his ears and closes his eyes; after a moment, he opens them slightly, only to wince at the sound of gunfire. The film ends with a freeze-frame on his face. He has experienced not only the death of the horse, but also an act of killing imposed on his father.

The slaughter of an animal is a key element in the film, functioning chiefly as a kind of metonymic illustration of a society in which the cruelest, most psychologically damaging work is assigned to the poorest and least powerful. The father in The Horse is hired to kill a single animal at a moment when his son happens to be present, but the father in Burnett’s MFA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, which was supported by an L. B. Mayer fellowship and budgeted at roughly $10,000, is hired to kill many animals on an almost daily basis, always out of sight of his family. Killer of Sheep is not only the culmination of a theme that had preoccupied Burnett, but also the climax of his work at UCLA. It was shot during weekends in Watts, using the local kids and other residents as both actors and crew. One of his major achievements and one of the most original American films ever made, it opened the way for his subsequent career.