Born in Mississippi in 1944, Charles Burnett was raised in Los Angeles, in an environment he later described as “Southern in culture....A lot of traditions were carried on, and storytelling was one.” At UCLA's film school in the early 1970s, along with fellow students Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodberry, Burnett set out to tell stories about African American life that rejected the clichés of the commercial cinema-both Blaxploitation-style sensationalism and simplistic “positive images.” Early works like the short Several Friends and his thesis film Killer of Sheep found unexpected beauty and humor in the everyday struggles of ordinary people under crushing economic and social pressures. Focused on family and community, embracing ambiguity and irony, they set a pattern for the films to come.
Burnett's films have won wide recognition in critical circles, even though they've never received the kind of distribution they deserve. The filmmaker was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1988, and Killer of Sheep is included in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Burnett “the most gifted and important black filmmaker this country has ever had.” Blackness both is and is not the point. Burnett's films consistently seek the universal in the particular; political but not schematic, they express a generous humanist vision.
Juliet Clark