Music for the Weekend:This Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington, featured in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.

Continuing this month’s posts on Black History Month, today we honor filmmaker Charles Burnett, considered as one of America’s great filmmakers, and many critics argue that he is in fact the greatest filmmaker that the United States has ever produced. It’s a solid argument that can be readily supported.

Drawing upon Italian neorealism of Fellini and Rosellini and infusing it with the raw energy of the contemporary black experience, Burns has created a canon that encapsulates a culture at a historical junction. We so often forget that the passages of Civil Rights bills like the Fair Housing Act were passed only 44 years ago, and that the civil freedoms granted to ethnic minorities in the United States are still being defined and refined. Many of the people who adhered to Jim Crow laws are still very much alive and have passed their ideologies of segregation and prejudice along to their kin. It will likely be many more decades before the scourge of racism will be extracted from our collective blood.

Burnett created films that showed this transition with a visual elegance and structural simplicity that allowed his message to be consumed by all. His skill at conveying feeling over simply proselytizing allowed people to vicariously live the African-American experience, to intimately connect through symbols and visual metaphors. This hearkens to classic structural functionalism, where symbols can be used to tie seemingly divergent mythologies together, bound by universal truths.

I saw Burnett’s film The Killer of Sheep in 2007, and one clip in particular stood out to me:

It’s quite innocent from the surface, but in drawing parallels to my own experience, it’s rather haunting and revealing. We see a young black girl singing a soul song whilst playing with her doll - a white doll - while her mother primps herself. It hearkens a memory of my own sister, who used to play with white Barbie dolls, and I remember her asking me to help color her Barbie’s hair black. She had put my father’s brown shoe polish on the doll’s skin. It was an attempt for us to try and find something relatable in the toys that we could buy - there were no South Asian dolls being made in mainstream America, which is still the case. (But behold Indian Barbie, or rather Barbie in India. It’s still a white girl, she’s just wearing Indian clothes).

But the Burnett clip is so touching because a child is unaware of her larger identity - a doll is just a doll - and she is having pure, innocent fun, as all kids should. As my sister and I did. Burnett understood who his audience was, and brilliantly juxtaposed this pure, fun and naturalistic moment within a context of racial tension and uncertainty, and this hammers down the point of being an exile within your own country beautifully and meaningfully.

Killer of Sheep was included in the Library of Congress in 1990, and it remains the strongest work of Burnett’s impressive canon. But more important is Burnett’s lasting influence not only on filmmakers of color, but filmmakers in general. Burnett was a key figure in the Black Independent Movement, which served as a direct response to racial prejudice in media and the creation of Blaxploitation films. The Black Independent Movement committed itself to political cinema told through the authentic prism of cultural experience, a sentiment that created echoes throughout a would that was in political upheaval (most notably Iran, which later created its own Iranian New Wave).

This legacy is seen today, as a new generation of black filmmakers and artists are responding to the stereotypes and false cultural idioms portrayed by mainstream media. Most notably is the backlash against the empire of Tyler Perry, who, while remaining independent is one of the true African-American success stories of recent memory, is criticized for cashing in on the derivative stereotypes of African-Americans on the Chitlin’ Circuit. Perry has received considerable criticism from the likes of Spike Lee, Idris Elba, Tom Burrell, and Touré for perpetuating negative stereotypes, and even South Park did a scathing criticism of Perry’s work.

We’re seeing a response to Perry’s Blaxploitation-style work, and to “noble savage” films like The Help and Driving Miss Daisy in the form of new independent black cinema, from Dee Rees’ Pariah to Spike Lee’s latest film Red Hook Summer, which was produced as a true independent . But the modern iteration also includes filmmakers of all races contributing to the authentic voices and experiences of the minority, like David Gordon Green’s haunting George Washington, Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar and Keith Miller’s 2012 Slamdance Grand Jury Winner Welcome to Pine Hill. There is a raceless counterculture of telling the stories of man with respect, dignity and unflinching truth. None of these films however would be viable without the initial contributions of Charles Burnett, who made it a point to not only make great cultural cinema, but just flat out make great cinema period.

NOTE: It is exceedingly difficult to criticize Tyler Perry, especially in light of his greater contributions to black enterprise. As Spike Lee put it, equal blame for the popularity of derivative works is to be placed upon the audience, who supports these works with their time and money. Ultimately it is the dollar that speaks louder than the intention. Charles Burnett himself never found much financial success with his films, despite their critical acclaim and beauty. And perhaps this is the lesson we must take from the likes of Burnett, which is that if we desire to see great films, then we must support the works of great filmmakers with our time and money. The media industry is designed to give us what we want, and if we continue to show the desire for ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ and ‘Meet the Browns,’ then that is what we will continue to receive. If we show the inclination, Tyler Perry will give us more films like ‘Precious’ (which he executive produced) and less films like ‘Madea Goes to Jail

Have a great weekend!