CHARLES BURNETT – We Are Movie Geeks

9th Annual Governors Awards Recipients Announced – Charles Burnett, Owen Roizman, Donald Sutherland And Agnès Varda

The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Tuesday night (September 5) to present Honorary Awards to writer-director Charles Burnett, cinematographer Owen Roizman, actor Donald Sutherland and director Agnès Varda. The four Oscar® statuettes will be presented at the Academy’s 9th Annual Governors Awards on Saturday, November 11, at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center.

“This year’s Governors Awards reflect the breadth of international, independent and mainstream filmmaking, and are tributes to four great artists whose work embodies the diversity of our shared humanity,” said Academy President John Bailey.

Born in Mississippi and raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Burnett is an independent filmmaker whose work has been praised for its portrayal of the African-American experience. He wrote, directed, produced, photographed and edited his first feature film, “Killer of Sheep,” in 1977. His other features include “My Brother’s Wedding,” “To Sleep with Anger,” “The Glass Shield” and “Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation.” Burnett also has made several documentaries including “America Becoming” and “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,” and such short films as “The Horse” and “When It Rains.”

Roizman earned five Oscar nominations for his work on “The French Connection” (1971), “The Exorcist” (1973), “Network” (1976), “Tootsie” (1982) and “Wyatt Earp” (1994). He began his career shooting television commercials before making his debut feature film, “Stop,” in 1970. His other notable credits include “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “Absence of Malice,” “True Confessions,” “The Addams Family” and “Grand Canyon.” Roizman represented the Cinematographers Branch on the Academy’s Board of Governors from 2002 to 2011.

With more than 140 film credits spanning six decades, Canadian-born Sutherland began his career with small roles in British and Italian films before his breakthrough in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967). Since then he has starred in such varied films as “M*A*S*H,” “Klute,” “Don’t Look Now,” “The Day of the Locust,” “1900,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Ordinary People,” “Cold Mountain,” “The Italian Job,” “Pride & Prejudice” and “The Hunger Games” series.

Belgian-born Varda has been called the mother of the French New Wave. Her first feature, “La Pointe Courte” (1956) – which she wrote and directed with no formal training – is considered to be the film that inspired the movement. Varda has experimented with all forms of filmmaking from shorts to documentaries to narrative feature films during her more than 60-year career, including such works as the New Wave classic “Cleo from 5 to 7,” “Le Bonheur,” “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” “Vagabond,” “Jacquot,” “The Gleaners and I,” her autobiographical documentary “The Beaches of Agnès,” and her most recent work, “Faces Places.”

The Honorary Award, an Oscar statuette, is given “to honor extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences, or for outstanding service to the Academy.”

SLIFF 2016 Interview: Charles Burnett – Director of KILLER OF SHEEP

Director Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP screens Sunday, Nov. 6 at 1:30pm at The St. Louis Public Library (1301 Olive St.). Director Burnett, a Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, and scholar Rebecca Wanzo (Washington U. associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and associate director of the Center for the Humanities) will be in attendance. This is a FREE event. Burnett’s TO SLEEP WITH ANGER screens Sunday, Nov. 6 at 8:00pm at The Tivoli Theater. Burnett and Ms Wanzo will be in attendance at that screening as well. It is also a FREE event.

SLIFF honors legendary filmmaker Charles Burnett with a Lifetime Achievement Award and screens a pair of his finest works — KILLER OF SHEEP and the new restoration of TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP focuses on everyday life in black communities in a manner unseen in American cinema, combining lyrical elements with a starkly neo-realist, documentary-style approach that chronicles the unfolding story with depth and riveting simplicity. This 1978 classic examines the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. He suffers from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation to such a degree that his entire life unhinges. One of the first 50 films to be selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, KILLER OF SHEEP was cited by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 Essential Films. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calls the film “an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.” The fine new restoration of director Charles’ Burnett’s TO SLEEP WITH ANGER concludes SLIFF’s two-part tribute to the Lifetime Achievement Award honoree. Burnett’s beautiful, poetic masterpiece is novelistic in its narrative density and richness of characterization. Harry Mention (a magnetic Danny Glover), an enigmatic drifter from the South, comes to visit an old acquaintance named Gideon (Paul Butler), who now lives in South-Central Los Angeles. Harry’s charming, down-home manner hides a malicious penchant for stirring up trouble, and he exerts a strange and powerful effect on the people in the town. The deep cast includes Mary Alice, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Carl Lumbly. The New Yorker’s Michael Sragow writes: “This eccentric comedy-drama is a truly folkloric film. Burnett and his cast tap depths of mystery, soulfulness, and glee.”

Charles Burnett took the time to talk with We Are Movie Geeks before his trip to St. Louis.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 2nd, 2016

Tom Stockman: You’re going to be here this weekend for the St. Louis international film Festival where their screening a couple of your films and giving you a lifetime achievement award, so congrats on that.

Charles Burnett: Thank you.

TS: I have it I have to confess I wasn’t very familiar with your body of work. I wanted to watch some of your films before I talked to you, but many of them are out of print. Fortunately, my local library had KILLER OF SHEEP, so I was able to watch that.

CB: I’m glad you were able to see it.

TS: Have you been to St. Louis before?

CB: I have, but it’s been a long time.

TS: Why did you want to become a filmmaker?

CB: I wanted to tell stories. I was attracted to photography and cinematography. I watched a lot of films growing up, and used to go to the movies a lot. I got interested in the camera aspect of it. Then I went to UCLA, and there you have to become a filmmaker. You have to write direct and shoot a film. So, that’s what I did. That’s how I became a filmmaker.

TS: So, KILLER OF SHEEP was your UCLA thesis project, Correct?

CB: That is right.

TS: I was listening to your commentary on the KILLER OF SHEEP DVD and you talk about rediscovering and restoring the film. Was it lost at one time?

CB: It was never lost. What happened was that when I made it at UCLA for my thesis film, I did not have to get a license for anything because it wasn’t going to be shown theatrically. Since it wasn’t going to be shown theatrically, there wasn’t any reason to get things like music rights ironed out. Many years later, when Milestone Films wanted to pick it up and release it on DVD, we had to go negotiate all of the rights at that point. It took quite a while to accomplish that.

TS: Had it been a long time since you had watched it?

CB: No, I was still attending screenings of it during those years.

TS: How did the idea for KILLER OF SHEEP come about? Was this autobiographical?

CB: No, it was not. It was based on stories about how some of the people in my community lived. I told in sort of a documentary fashion. I didn’t want to do anything with it that would remind anyone of a Hollywood film, anything that was manufactured. I just went down to the community and shot what was there.

TS: In that DVD commentary, the moderator asks you your feelings about the Blaxploitation films from earlier in the 70s. You said you’re not a fan of those. Your termed them “counterproductive”. Can you elaborate on that?

CB: A number of things had happened. Hollywood was making these awful films that distorted the reality of black life really starting with BIRTH OF A NATION. This just continued, you never saw films that dealt honestly with black people’s humanity. That’s one of the reasons I got into film. When Blaxploitation films came out, it was a time when just having a black character as a hero was enough. But these heroes were violent. It did not reflect the heroes that I had seen in the community, working class people who work hard for their families and to just survive. I thought these Blaxploitation films, with gangsters and pimps some things like that, and the violence, I just didn’t think that was necessary.

TS: Do you think those films reinforced negative stereotypes?

CB: Yes, but it was sort of ambivalent in a way. You had a need for a hero and a need for a black person to be in charge of his destiny and to be the subject of a story. And that was all positive, but just the nature of it all being involved with crime and drugs, that was what I rebelled against.

TS: Did you see those films when they were new?

CB: I saw some of them, but I just wasn’t interested in them.

TS: Were you ever approached to work on a film like those Blaxploitation films?

CB: Yes I was, but I turned that down.

TS: Who was at UCLA when you were there that I may be familiar with?

CB: There were a lot of people. Alex Cox, who went on to make REPO MAN. Julie Dash was there with me. Some of the names escape me, this was almost 40 years ago.

TS: Do you enjoy going to these film festivals in participating in Q&A’s?

CB: I do, it’s a great way to build an audience and you get to learn more and more about people and what they like to watch, and things like that.

TS: What’s your next project?

CB: I’m currently working on a new documentary about integrated housing that came along with the passing of the civil rights bill. Trying to get that finished.

TS: Well good luck with that. And I hope to see you this weekend at the St. Louis international film Festival.

CB: Thank you, I’m looking forward to it as well.

St. Louis Library Presents – DIRECTORS CUT: THE FILMS OF CHARLES BURNETT Beginning October 18th

The St. Louis Central Library downtown (1301 Olive Blvd) is teaming up with Cinema St. Louis and the St. Louis International Film Festival to present DIRECTORS CUT: THE FILMS OF CHARLES BURNETT.

Charles Burnett is a writer-director whose work has received extensive honors. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, his family soon moved to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Burnett studied creative writing at UCLA before entering the University’s graduate film program. His thesis project, Killer of Sheep (1977), won accolades at film festivals and a critical devotion; in 1990, it was among the first titles named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. European financing allowed Burnett to shoot his second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), but a rushed debut prevented the filmmaker from completing his final cut until 2007. In 1988, Burnett was awarded the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur (“genius grant”) Fellowship. His first widely released film, To Sleep with Anger (1990), was also chosen for the National Film Registry, and Burnett became the first African American recipient of the National Society of Film Critics’ best screenplay award. Burnett made the highly acclaimed “Nightjohn” in 1996 for the Disney Channel; his subsequent television works include “Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding” (1998), “Selma, Lord, Selma” (1999), an episode of the seven-part series “Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues” (2003) and “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property” (2003), which was shown on the PBS series “Independent Lens.” Burnett has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the J. P. Getty Foundation. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art showcased his work with a month-long retrospective.

DIRECTORS CUT: THE FILMS OF CHARLES BURNETT is a series of four films by director Charles Burnett. The fourth film, KILLER OF SHEEP, will feature a special appearance by Burnett and is part of the St. Louis International Film Festival. All films are free and are screened in the library’s Central Auditorium.

Here’s the line-up for DIRECTORS CUT: THE FILMS OF CHARLES BURNETT:

NAT TURNER: A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY October 18^th 6:30pm
2003 – 58 minutes

n 1831, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Virginia that resulted in the murder of local slave owners and their families—as well Turner’s execution. At once an ambivalent cultural hero, a revolutionary figure and a subject of countless literary works, Turner has remained a “troublesome property” for those who have struggled to understand him and the meaning of his revolt, often resulting in controversy. As literary critic Henry Louis Gates explains: “There is no Nat Turner to recover… you have to create the man and his voice.”

The earliest source of information about Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, was not written by him at all, assembled instead out of a series of jail cell interviews by white Virginia lawyer Thomas R. Gray. The man portrayed in this first telling of the Nat Turner story clearly saw himself as a prophet, steeped in the traditions of apocalyptic Christianity. However, this “confession” raised the question of whether Turner was an inspired and brilliant religious leader in search of freedom for his people or a deluded lunatic leading slaves to their doom.

NAT TURNER: A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY examines how the story of Turner and his revolt have been continuously re-told since 1831. Historians Eugene Genovese and Herbert Aptheker discuss how the figure of Turner became a metaphor for racial tension. Religious scholar Vincent Harding and legal scholar Martha Minow reflect on America’s attitudes towards violence. Professor of psychiatry and race relations expert Dr. Alvin Poussaint and actor Ossie Davis recall how Nat Turner became a hero in the black community. And when William Styron published his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner—inventing a sexually charged relationship between Turner and a white teenaged girl he later killed—it unleashed one of the most bitter intellectual battles of the 1960s. Turner’s rebellion continues to raise new questions about the nature of terrorism and other forms of violent resistance to oppression.

A unique collaboration between MacArthur Genius Award feature director Charles Burnett, acclaimed historian of slavery Kenneth S. Greenberg and Academy Award-nominated documentary producer Frank Christopher, NAT TURNER adopts an innovative structure by interspersing documentary footage and interviews with dramatizations of different versions of the story, using a new actor to represent Turner in each. The filmmakers have interviewed a broad range of contemporary African American and white descendants of those involved in the revolt, historians, writers and artists, and weave these interviews with dramatic recreations based on folklore, novels and plays—reflecting the multifaceted legacy of Nat Turner in America today.

MY BROTHER’S WEDDING October 25^th 6:3pm
1983 115 minutes

When we first see Pierce Mundy (Everette Silas) in director Charles Burnett’s feature follow-up to Killer of Sheep (1977) he’s on the move. Making his way on a summer afternoon down a cracked sidewalk in South Central Los Angeles, he’s heading to see the mother of his best friend about to return from prison. A voice from behind catches him up short: “Hey, Pierce!” In the long shot that introduces him, Pierce turns mid-stride, looks to the woman calling him and in a single fluid move, looks away, exasperated, back toward his intended destination. “Come see my sister’s baby!” Though he’s tall and lean, we feel the petulant weight in his every step as he retreats in the direction he’s just come.

This sequence, though brief, deftly establishes the major themes of My Brother’s Wedding, and the power of Burnett’s unadorned style. Pulled in opposing directions by loyalty to family and friends, Pierce feels suspended in place. Recently laid off from his factory job, he marks time working at his family’s dry cleaning store under the watchful eye of his mother (Jessie Holmes) and swapping loaded jabs with his brother’s upper-middle-class fiancée (Gaye Shannon-Burnett). In the face of a diminished future, the return of Pierce’s best friend, Soldier (Ronald E. Bell), holds out a nostalgic escape to childhood, albeit one burdened by the decimation of his generation through violence and incarceration. “Where is everyone?” Soldier asks of the old crew. “It’s you and me,” Pierce replies.

While the contour of Pierce’s situation is familiar, Burnett fleshes it out with richly observed detail. Shooting on location, Burnett doesn’t simply capture locales; he reveals, through incidents and episodes both humorous and poignant, the network of relationships that pull and tug at the lives on screen. The revelation of character becomes seamlessly bound to the revelation of community. When, in the film’s finale, Pierce once again faces a choice of which direction to turn, both literally and metaphorically, his decision resonates well beyond his personal history.

THE GLASS SHIELD October 29^th 1pm
1994 119 minutes

Charles Burnett followed up To Sleep with Anger with this sorely underrated L.A. crime drama. Michael Boatman stars as rookie cop J.J., the first black deputy within his department; he quickly experiences firsthand a deep-seated culture of racism within the LAPD, and in an effort to fit in he participates in the questionable arrest of Teddy Woods (Ice Cube). But when J.J. discovers that he has unconsciously made himself complicit in a far-reaching frame-up, he and fellow ostracized cop Barbara (Victoria Dillard) set out to bring a clandestine and racist power structure within the LAPD to its knees. Also featuring strong turns by Bernie Casey and Elliott Gould and released around the time of the O.J. Simpson trial, this gripping thriller is Burnett’s most stylized and explicitly political film to date.

KILLER OF SHEEP November 6^th 1:30pm
1978 83 minutes

The St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF) honors legendary filmmaker Charles Burnett with a Lifetime Achievement Award and screens KILLER OF SHEEP at the library. Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” focuses on everyday life in black communities in a manner unseen in American cinema, combining lyrical elements with a starkly neo-realist, documentary-style approach that chronicles the unfolding story with depth and riveting simplicity. This 1978 classic examines the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. He suffers from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation to such a degree that his entire life unhinges. One of the first 50 films to be selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, “Killer of Sheep” was cited by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 Essential Films. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calls the film “an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.”

SLIFF will also be screening Burnett’s TO SLEEP WITH ANGER Sunday, Nov. 6 at 8:00pm at The Tivoli Theater as part of The St. Louis International Film Festival

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: