Film review: Killer of Sheep

Killer of Sheep (dir. Charles Burnett, 1977). Killer of Sheep offers a non-narrative approach that allows Burnett to express a community's internal dialectic and their complicated relationship to the external world—two processes that define the individual and collective experience of the community. As an historical document, it relates essential details of black life in 20th century America as cuttingly precise and intense as the work of masters like Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed; as a work of cinematic art, it is a frightening portrait of conditioning with currents of hope. Originally filmed as Burnett's film school dissertation in 1977, it remained sadly unseen but heavily mythologized until some boring soundtrack-related legal considerations were worked out about 30 years later. A