In this episode of the podcast we talk about a great American film, Charles Burnett's debut feature Killer of Sheep (1977)
0:00 Intro
2:07 Killer of Sheep
9:27 The Gradual Reveal / Kids and Adults
12:19 Improvised Games
14:55 Continuing a Tradition
16:48 Stan's Malaise
18:31 Bittersweet Humor / Sisyphean Struggle
22:53 Clip: Stan's Wife Dispatches Unsavory Characters
24:00 Pulling Stan Out
25:35 Captured Moments, Real Settings
27:12 Issues of Class
28:37 Low Placement of the Camera
32:11 Long Shot to Close-Up
33:30 Burnett's Other Films
39:08 This Bitter Earth
40:45 David Gordon Green on Killer of Sheep
43:01 Outro
Duration: 44:08
Notes
- "This Bitter Earth," Dinah Washington
- Other Charles Burnett films mentioned: Nightjohn, To Sleep with Anger, and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property
- Killer of Sheep belongs to a strong tradition of films that show how the worlds of children and adults intersect. Other films we mentioned: Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921), Homework (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989) (and many other Kiarostami films), Ohayô (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959), I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932), and Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, 2006)
- A correction: when I cited a few juxtapositions in the film and talked about how the various, disparate images "mingle in the mind," my recollection of the details was a bit off. The boys running in the street (from dogs) is indeed followed by Stan at work in the slaughterhouse, but the check-cashing scene -- which in my head was followed again by a look at Stan's job, and specifically the hooks -- is actually followed by a group of boys riding a bike out into the street in front of a car, which nicely completes a circle of danger, come to think of it. The hooks appear elsewhere.
- Milestone Films official site for Killer of Sheep