Three By Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett's cinematic masterpiece Killer of Sheep, magnificently restored in 4K with sparkling picture and sound, is kicking off our Three By Charles Burnett series! The film evokes the everyday trials, fragile pleasures, and tenacious humor of blue-collar African Americans living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1970s. Burnett made it on a minuscule budget with a mostly nonprofessional cast, combining keen on-the-street observation with a carefully crafted script. The story centers on Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a slaughterhouse worker battling exhaustion and disconnected from his wife, his children, and himself. Stan and his neighbors struggle just to get by, let alone get ahead. Only the kids, leaping from roof to roof, seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders. Burnett’s film focuses on everyday life in Black communities in a manner rarely seen in American cinema – combining lyrical elements with a starkly neorealist, documentary-style approach that combines deep nuance with riveting simplicity.

A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, To Sleep With Anger is a singular piece of American mythmaking that we are honored to include as part of our Three By Charles Burnett series! In a towering performance, Danny Glover plays the enigmatic southern drifter Harry, a devilish charmer who turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry’s presence seems to cast a chaotic spell on what appeared to be a peaceful household, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, To Sleep with Anger is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility; a portrait of family resilience steeped in the traditions of African American mysticism and folklore.

The final film in our Three By Charles Burnett series is his charming 1999 drama The Annihilation Of Fish, now restored in a beautiful 4K restoration! Lynn Redgrave plays Poinsettia, a former housewife with an imagined lover in the form of 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini. She moves into a Los Angeles boarding house with an energetic landlady (Margot Kidder) where she meets a Jamaican widower, Fish (James Earl Jones), who has recently been released from a mental institution despite his continued battles against unseen demons. In the face of personal challenges and differences, the couple grows together and begins to discover new things about themselves and the nuances of love and happiness. Released in partnership with Milestone Films, restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.