Maybe you’ve seen it: that black-and-white footage of Black boys leaping between apartment buildings, soaring across the Los Angeles sky. Charles Burnett captured these low-shot acrobatics on 16mm for his UCLA master’s thesis film, 1978’s Killer of Sheep, which he wrote, directed, shot and edited himself. Poor printing quality and music copyright expenses (‘Reasons’ by Earth, Wind & Fire costs a pretty penny) limited the project’s initial distribution, but for its 48th anniversary, a 4K restoration of the film releases theatrically with its original soundtrack fully intact. 

In Burnett’s ’70s-set debut Killer of Sheep, slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) lives with his wife and children in the Watts district of Los Angeles, where Burnett grew up and set his first five features. We watch Stan contending with household quarrels and curbing neighborhood scammers, intercut with the slaughterhouses’ monotony, the clamor of abattoir machines and the undoing of white sheep. The film wanders with neighborhood boys along train tracks, as they while their youth away in crabgrassed cement lots, discerning what kind of men they will become. Los Angeleno Carlos writes on Letterboxd that Killer of Sheep offers an “appreciation of the single day’s doldrums,” understanding the film as more interested in the textures of the everyday, than offering traditional character arc or plot resolution.

Wes marvels at the visual dichotomy between boyhood and adulthood in Killer of Sheep, noticing that Burnett “allow[s] the kids to stay kids throughout (ie. jumping across roofs, throwing rocks at each other and all the other weird kid shit), while transposing the violence Black kids usually are subject to on screen to the sheep who are hung upside down.” Burnett’s disinterest in aggrandizing images of Black toil emerges from the LA Rebellion dialectic that he began developing at film school, when movies like Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man created a sense of possibility for Burnett and his contemporaries.

Burnett’s commitment to visually articulating Black American life in careful, naturalistic ways stretches from his first Los Angeles-set narrative to his penultimate, 1999’s The Annihilation of Fish, starring James Earl Jones as a mentally ill Jamaican widower and demon wrestler. A key recurring physical gag in the film sees Fish (Jones) best an invisible demon and chuck it out his apartment window, leaving a tree canopy to rustle and give beneath the weight of the floundering creature.

The LA director’s filmography is in comionate, consistent conversation with South Central Los Angeles. He renders Watts as an embodied, breathing character unto itself, one whose ebbs and curves can be chronicled across his early output. This style of place-based filmmaking, the reverence for a recurring, salient locale, is inextricable from Burnett’s work and a kindred characteristic of several successive independent filmmakers.

Mike Mills’ triptych of semi-autobiographical family narratives, Beginners, 20th Century Women and C’mon C’mon, are self-portraits not only of his nuclear family but of Santa Barbara and downtown Los Angeles, in the ’70s and the early ’00s. And from Slacker to Boyhood alone, Richard Linklater made seven features set in Austin, Texas. For John Singleton, narratives like Poetic Justice unfold in South Central with his magnum opus Boyz n the Hood being set, like many of Burnett’s films, in Watts.

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and raised in Watts, Burnett was vocationally pipelined into studying electronics in college before discovering his affinity for writing and filmmaking. “It was mostly this teacher, Elizabeth, that I had in college,” he recalls. “She was a photojournalist and wrote novels herself, and she introduced me to a whole bunch of writers and things.”

Burnett’s rookie foray into photojournalism resulted in a faux pas that turned him away from still photography and toward the moving image. “When I got a camera, I shot this young girl who had died of an overdose,” he says. “I was being very insensitive, shooting her. I was getting ready to do Killer of Sheep, but I thought, ‘Do this first.’” But a relative of the girl approached Burnett and inquired about why he was capturing images of “tragedies.” The remark was a wake-up call for the director. “I put the camera away and didn’t pick it up after that. I didn’t want to be a photojournalist anymore.”

Lessons learned in the world of stills influenced Burnett’s foray into motion pictures. The auteur expresses a kindred remorse about filming his beloved sequence of Black boys flying high, without a stunt coordinator. “When you’re behind the camera, you can ask people to do anything, shoot anything, and feel connected to it,” he says. “I had these kids jump over the roof… every time I see that scene, I look at myself and say, ‘These kids could have fallen.’ Being a camera person or filmmaker, you can be so insensitive. Not realizing the danger you put people in just to get a shot. That really changed me.”

“Little kids, like ten to thirteen years old, were working on the film, doing sound—because if you can turn on a hi-fi, you can certainly work sound equipment,” he re. “They helped, doing a whole lot of technical stuff. Sometimes it suffers because of that, and I wanted it to look scratchy and like I just got it by luck. I wasn’t trying to manipulate anything. I tried to capture what was there, and that was it. Things like that helped produce the quality and look of the film.”

The realistic quality of Killer of Sheep’s cinematography was influenced by Burnett’s affinity for the work of Dutch director-cinematographer Joris Ivens, and the “lyrical feel” of Pare Lorentz’s early documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains. “I wanted to shoot Killer of Sheep like I was shooting a documentary, where I had to shoot and get what I shot without thinking of building the scene or getting coverage. You get what you can, and you move on.”

This cinematographic approach helped Burnett achieve that naturalistic, ostensibly spontaneous feel that’s so grounded in the daily mundane. Graham shares, “Nothing happens. It’s perfect… I think everyone, at some time, has fantasised about making a film like Killer of Sheep… Few directors have had their eyes open to the world like this, and as ‘realism’ eventually became a kind of cinematic style rather than a response to reality, few directors would bother trying.”

In Robert Daniels’ conversation with RaMell Ross for Letterboxd, Ross cites Killer of Sheep as an early influence on “centralizing the Black gaze” in the visual language that he and cinematographer Jomo Fray developed for Nickel Boys. When Burnett was honored by the Academy in 2017, Pariah and Mudbound director Dee Rees attested that Killer of Sheep’s “speed of life” style changed her perception of “what could be done” as a filmmaker.

The sense of responsibility and intention with which Burnett and his contemporaries approached their work has paved the way for a generation of emerging auteurs to upkeep the place-based, “speed of life” Black independent film tradition. UCLA alum Cauleen Smith’s debut, Drylongso, draws from this tradition, as protagonist Pica (Toby Smith) photographs Black men she fears will disappear from her community. Savanah Leaf’s Oakland-set BIFA winner Earth Mama is in many ways in conversation with Alile Sharon Larkin’s Your Children Come Back to You from 1979, both comionate California character studies about motherhood. Similarly, the fish fry weekend socials in Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger share a connection with the Mississippi sweat and living room slow dancing of Raven Jackson’s debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Jackson exalts slow, Black domesticity and, with Fray as cinematographer, develops a visual style heavily influenced by still photography and documentary, just like Burnett.

Burnett ties his explorations of Southern influence to his family’s own Great Migration move. He recalls this hybridization and “mythical quality” of folk culture and superstition having an immense impact on his upbringing. During our conversation, Burnett shared a few lines of song, one from his youth that was brought to him by fellow Southerners who spoke of its connections to Africa. 

“The South was always this mysterious place that had these strange habits and ways,” he says. “We thought it was a bit weird, particularly about voodoo and stuff like that. When we were kids, we didn’t want nothing to do with the South of the country or any of the old folkways—until you get older, and you realize that that’s somehow played a very important part in your growing up in life.”

As our conversation winds down, I ask Burnett what it has meant to him to make films about the lives of Black folks in Southern California. “I felt I was contributing. I was part of the solution,” Burnett says. “I grew up in the Civil Rights Movement, and there was this feeling that you had a responsibility to make improvements, to say something progressive and to be part of making positive change. It was Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Panthers.”

“There was a lot of this dialogue about what films we should be making. What speaks to the Black community? Showing films in the community was the best thing. Pearl Bowser [early Black independent cinema archivist and programmer] had these programs that get Black independent films and screen them in the community… so we had a direct dialogue with people in the community telling us what they wanted, what was real and what was unreal and what were the kind of films they wanted to see.”

Bowser’s legacy as an early archivist and champion of Black independent cinema is being carried forth by the likes of Maya Cade with the Black Film Archive, just as the slow, realist cinema championed by Burnett has been propelled and interpolated by subsequent generations of filmmakers: Cauleen Smith. Ayoka Chenzira. Dee Rees. RaMell Ross. Savanah Leaf. Raven Jackson. Barry Jenkins, who Burnett mentions having spoken to on the phone “just the other day.”

This lineage of artists striving to honor the essence and expansiveness of Black life in their onscreen worlds will unfurl as far out as independent cinema will stretch. The beauty of independent cinema, and other low-budget DIY art forms, is that once a project is completed it will never not exist again. There are generations of fledgling filmmakers who have yet to discover the LA Rebellion and the work of Julie Dash, Alile Larkin, Charles Burnett. But when they encounter these projects, something alchemical will occur. Cinematic possibilities will emerge in their minds and tongues and pens. They will follow Burnett’s camera down railroad tracks and through meandering cement lots, they will bathe in appreciation of the ‘single day’s doldrums.’ With their films, the ones the world is waiting to see, they too will take flight.