DVD of the Week: Killer of Sheep

It was a stunning revelation to see Charles Burnett’s first feature, “Killer of Sheep,” in 2007—thirty years after it was made and several weeks before its first commercial release. David Denby wrote about it in the magazine, and mentioned that it was delayed by questions concerning music rights. Burnett’s choice of music is indeed exquisite, and central to the film, which lacks what would usually be called movie music: Dinah Washington, Elmore James, Paul Robeson, and Rachmaninoff all enrich the texture of the film with what ought to be called lived music. As I discuss in the clip above, the movie has the feel of a blues ballad, in that the sorrows it depicts nonetheless rise to a cinematic exultation, a joy in existence itself. And, like a jazz musician, Burnett makes use of all sorts of sources—popular and formal, old and new—as the basis for his spontaneous yet complex visual lyricism. And the rich emotional life he evokes with those methods is mercurial—the depth of mood yields up surprising, iridescent details, like bubbles and shimmers of feeling, that conjure a vast span of inner life from the film’s straightforward particulars. “Killer of Sheep” is one of the great débuts in the history of cinema; though this treasure is now restored to its rightful place in history, the decades can’t be remade, and the gap in the world of filmmaking—and in the world as such—that the movie’s unavailability represented can never be made good.