This Month

Charles Burnett made an auspicious feature debut in 1977 with Killer of Sheep, a powerful, poetic portrait of life in the Los Angeles ghetto Watts which he made as his thesis film for the filmmaking program at UCLA. The B&W feature gained international recognition at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Critics' Prize, and was chosen as a "national treasure" and put on the National Film Registry in 1990. It's a landmark of African American filmmaking and American independent cinema, yet it never received a theatrical release until 2007, due to the expense of clearing the music rights for the rich soundtrack of classic and contemporary songs.

Burnett's follow-up film, My Brother's Wedding was to suffer much the same public fate, though for different reasons. Commissioned by the German TV network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen after it saw Killer of Sheep in Berlin and financed with help from a Guggenheim fellowship and funding from Channel 4 in England, Burnett wrote the original screenplay and began shooting the film in 1983, on location in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up.

Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) works the counter of his parents' dry cleaning business. He's not necessarily the black sheep of the Mundy family, but he has few prospects and far less ambition than his upwardly mobile brother Wendell (Dennis Kemper), a lawyer about to marry into a wealthy professional family. Pierce bristles at his mother's deference to Wendell's fiancée Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett) and has nothing but disdain for her snooty, socially pretentious family. Meanwhile he falls back into juvenile shenanigans with his boyhood buddy Soldier (Ronnie Bell), an ex-con who promises his mother to go straight but spends his days womanizing and killing time while Pierce enables his worst instincts.

Everett Silas anchors the film with his focused performance as the unfocused Pierce, but off-screen his behavior delayed the low-budget production, first when he essentially went on strike to demand a larger salary, and then when he dropped out of sight altogether (he turned up a few months later in New Orleans where he had become a preacher). The production dragged on for a year and Burnett was already late when he submitted his nearly two-hour rough cut to the German studio, which proceeded to show the unfinished cut in the New Directors/New Films festival in New York. Due to tepid reviews, My Brother's Wedding was never picked up for distribution and it languished for almost 25 years ("a catastrophic blow to the development of American culture," according to film critic Armond White) until Milestone (the studio that finally cleared the song rights for Killer of Sheep and distributed it to great acclaim in 2007) acquired the rights and enabled Burnett to finally finish editing the film. Trimmed by more than half an hour, the 82-minute "Director's Cut" was released in 2007.

Burnett described the film as a "tragic comedy" of a young man who "is not that emotionally mature. Philosophically, he looks at life in terms of the haves and have nots... He romanticizes the poor for the wrong reasons, and he hates the middle class for the wrong reasons. He sees things in black and white." Burnett's portrait of Pierce's world, however, is anything but black and white. He paints a world of complex family dynamics and social relations: dominant mothers, passive fathers, unwed pregnant young women and unfocused and irresponsible men. Crime and violence is part of the fabric of life (Burnett doesn't show it onscreen, but the echoes are felt in numerous scenes) and citizens and shop-owners keep guns for self-defense, yet neighbors are often treated like extended family. Pierce spends hours caring for aging neighborhood elders, taking responsibility for everyone but himself.

Like Killer of Sheep, the cast is largely nonprofessional and he uses them to capture the rhythm and color of the neighborhood. In other scenes, however, Burnett eschews that naturalism for a more satirical approach, caricaturing the bourgeois middle-class figures by exaggerating their affectations and pompous behavior. "They were the other extreme, with no soul, no morals or wisdom," Burnett explained in a 1988 interview. My Brother's Wedding, I think, was more moralistic than Killer of Sheep. It was more didactic." At the heart of the film, however, is a clear-eyed look at details and rhythms of everyday life in a culture too often seen on the screen only in crime thrillers and "blaxpoitation" films. "If a better film has been made about black life in the ghetto," writes Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "I haven't seen it."

Producers: Charles Burnett and Gaye-Shannon Burnett
Director: Charles Burnett
Screenplay: Charles Burnett
Cinematography: Charles Burnett
Film Editing: Thomas Penick
Cast: Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), Mrs. Mundy (Jessie Holmes), Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett), Soldier Richards (Ronnie Bell), Wendell Mundy (Dennis Kemper), Sally Easter, Angela (Angela Burnett), Walker (Charles Bracy), Sonia's mother (Frances E. Nealy), Sonia's father (Sy Richardson).
C-82m.

by Sean Axmaker