Charles Burnett – Killer of Sheep (1978) (HD)

Quote:
An African-American man working at a slaughterhouse in the Watts area of Los Angeles leads a dissatisfied and listless existence.

Quote:
Killer of Sheep examines the black Los Angeles ghetto 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. Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life — sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.

The film was shot in roughly a year of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, paid for partially by a Louis B. Mayer grant of $3,000, and also out of the pocket of Burnett himself, who at the time was working at a small, boutique casting agency by the name of Chasin, Park & Citron. Shot on location with a mostly amateur cast, much handheld camera work, and an episodic narrative with gritty documentary-style cinematography, Killer of Sheep has been compared by film critics and scholars to Italian neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan. Burnett cites Basil Wright’s Songs of Ceylon and Night Mail and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner as his main influences.

The film stood apart from many of the more overtly political independents of the day in its understated simplicity. Burnett explains, “I come from a working-class environment and I wanted to express what the realities were. People were trying to get jobs, and once they found jobs they were fully concerned with keeping them. And they were confronted with other problems, with serious problems at home for example, which made things much more difficult.”

Killer of Sheep played at a handful of colleges and festivals in before receiving the Critics’ Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981. In 1990, the Library of Congress declared the film a national treasure and placed it among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance. In 2002, the National Society of Film Critics selected the film as one of the 100 essential films of all time. Despite these accolades, Killer of Sheep never saw widespread commercial distribution due to the expense of the clearing of the music rights to the songs featured on the film’s soundtrack. In its rare viewings at festivals and museums it was shown on ragged 16mm prints. Now, thirty years later, the sparkling 35mm restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive is ready for its long-awaited theatrical release.

One of the great achievements of the film is its soundtrack, which Burnett envisioned as an aural history of African-American popular music, including songs by Etta James, Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, Little Walter, and Earth, Wind & Fire. In The A-List: 100 Essential Films, critic Armond White explains, “unsentimental blues wisdom forms the foundation of Burnett’s drama.” Burnett’s aptitude for keenly juxtaposing image and music has drawn comparisons to Stanley Kubrick among others. Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine describes the music in Killer of Sheep as “drunk on hope” and says that it “reinforces the joy of Burnett’s sad images.” The complex interplay of hope and sorrow that is present in African-American music, namely blues, was recognized widely by critics and scholars as a fitting metaphor for the simultaneous sorrow and joy found in Killer of Sheep. One reviewer in Time magazine described Burnett’s filmmaking style as
“good, old, urban blues.”

One of the inspirations for the film was a song that never ended up on the soundtrack, Luis Russell’s “Sad Lover Blues.” It was a song Burnett’s mother would play all the time when he was young and he originally imagined the song playing in the scene in which Stan is dancing with his wife. But before the scene was shot, the brittle old wax record broke. Burnett’s friend, fellow director Haile Gerima (Sankofa, 1993), who was helping out on the film at the time, recalls driving with Burnett all over LA in Burnett’s Volkswagen, stopping at every music store they saw and going in holding the shattered record, asking if the store carried a copy. There search was fruitless and in the end, Burnett decided to go with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” for the scene, a song with a similarly melancholy feel.

Killer.of.Sheep.1978.1080p.UHD.BluRay.SDR.FLAC1.0.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 21 min
Size: 	11.4 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1440x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	19.5 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.523
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch FLAC @ 268 kb/s (Criterion Collection USA UHD Blu-ray (2025))
#2:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Charles Burnett and film scholar Richard Peña / Criterion Collection USA UHD Blu-ray (2025))

https://nitro.download/view/02B2989FF500062/Killer.of.Sheep.1978.1080p.UHD.BluRay.SDR.FLAC1.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English