Good moments in a tough world: the films of Charles Burnett: dreams, disorder, and hard-won hope are revealed in the universe of a filmmaker showcased on a new two-disc special-edition DVD from Milestone Film & Video.

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For decades, Charles Burnett's film Killer of Sheep was nearly as short on luck as one of the African-American Watts residents it portrays. Made for less than ten thousand dollars, shot over a number of years (because one member of Burnett's nonprofessional cast was in prison for much of that time), the film was completed in 1973 but not shown until five years later, and even then not in wide release, since Burnett had not secured rights to the music in it. Killer of Sheep did take home the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981, became one of the first fifty films chosen for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1990, and helped Burnett win a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant in 1988; its honors, in fact, seemed to outnumber its viewers. That changed in 2007, when the film, seen since the 1970s mainly in 16mm prints at film festivals or on clunky machines in libraries (which is how I first saw it), was restored in a gorgeous 35mm print by UCLA and released in theaters at the end of March. Burnett may disagree, but I'll say it anyway: it was worth the wait.

Shot in black and white, Killer of Sheep focuses on Stan (played by Henry Gayle Saunders), a resident of a lower-class neighborhood in Watts, married father of two, worker at a sheep slaughterhouse--and insomniac. Stan is never shown lying wide awake in bed, because he has given up even trying to sleep; he drags himself through his off-hours as he does through his work shifts. He has similarly backed away from any effort to communicate in a meaningful way with his family, particularly his long-suffering wife (Kaycee Moore), from whom he seems cut off emotionally and sexually; the most heartrending scene in the film shows the two slow-dancing to a Dinah Washington song, she kissing his bare chest, he remaining impassive before simply walking away, leaving her in an agony of frustration and yearning.

A decade ago, in a piece for Cineaste about Burnett's films, (1) I wrote, "Stan's true problem is not that he can't get to sleep but that he seems to be in one long, tiresome dream from which he can't rouse himself; episodes in the film, as in a dream, don't conclude so much as blend into different episodes." True, as far as it goes--but it now seems to me that the foray into the world of dreams in Killer of Sheep is deeper and more deliberate than that passage suggests; deeper, even, than that in such surrealist films as Bunuel's Un Chien andalou or L'Age d'or, whose raison d'etre seems to have been limited to shocking and teasing. Killer of Sheep, by contrast, uses dreamlike sequences to show some eternal and unsettling truths. Show them--not tell them. Indeed, one of the triumphs of Killer of Sheep is that it does not interpret for us; as in the world of dreams the film so beautifully emulates, things happen for no spelled-out reasons and in no apparent order--they simply happen, and, like the characters, we make of them what we can.

Stan's emotional detachment seems to be a defense against the bleakness and hopelessness of his surroundings. His environment is one in which people have little and must struggle and fight even for that; the primary focus is on survival. In the pretitle sequence, a boy (young Stan?) is berated by his father and slapped by his mother for not jumping in to help his brother in a fight--never mind that the brother started it. The boy and his brother, the father says, will have only each other if their parents are not around, and so they must stick together. For these characters, morality is synonymous with staying alive, and whatever it takes to do that; as another character later puts it, "Animal's got its teeth, man's got his fists." That line reinforces the connection between the people with whom Stan lives and the animals (sheep) around which he works--an obvious connection, maybe, but one Burnett underscores in subtle and even brilliant ways. (One is a shot, straight up, from ground level, of boys leaping from one rooftop to another. It echoes the jumping of the sheep Stan would be forced to count if he tried to go to sleep, while suggesting the dangerous nature of even the leisure-time pursuits of these characters.) The sheep in the slaughterhouse, of course, have no clue about who is responsible for their condition and little perspective on the condition itself. They're just in it. The same is true of Stan's peers, who give no thought to the forces dictating the way they live--only to their occasional, doomed efforts to change it.

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Which brings us back to the dream world. Two characteristics of dreams are that their logic frequently leads to a dead end, with bizarre details along the way connected to nothing at all, and that, for all the disorder of dreams, they sometimes cut to the heart of what we think, feel, or fear. Those two things would seem to contradict each other, but Killer of Sheep goes a long way toward reconciling them. Stan and his friends make two attempts to improve their lives just a little. The first takes Stan and a buddy to the house of a man with a car engine to sell. The scene in the man's home, though it is not technically a dream sequence, does as good a job as anything ever filmed of capturing the subtly askew nature of the things we see as we sleep. The owner of the engine, seated at a table next to his wife but playing cards by himself, wears a suit whose unremarked-upon design would turn heads on a New York City street; lying on the floor is his nephew, nursing wounds from a beating by a man who "didn't have nothing else to do with his hands and feet." The nephew gets into an argument with the wife, who begins beating him herself. Stan and his friend remark on this to the owner of the engine, who, pulling at his very full head of hair, responds, "Can't you see I don't give a damn? My hair's tailing out." Why was the nephew beaten up the first time? Why does the man think his hair is falling out, and why has the subject come up at all? Just as well to ask: Why do the characters have to live this way? The answer, in a world--our world--devoid of reason and morality and defined by evil and randomness, is the same in each case: Because. Any other questions?

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Once they have the engine, Stan and his friend maneuver it laboriously down several flights of stairs, then place it in the backless bed of a pickup truck parked on a hill. We know what will happen as soon as they try to drive away--and so do they, on some level, as one of them makes clear with his very assurance that everything will be all right. The moment they start up the truck, of course, the engine is thrown to the street and broken beyond repair. As in many a dream, the men see their path heading toward disaster, yet they follow it anyway. The second attempt by Stan and his friends to get ahead involves a drive to a race track to put money on a promising horse; on the way they get a fiat tire and realize they don't have a spare. Both the engine and race-track sequences involve cars and aborted attempts at forward motion. Who hasn't had the dream in which you try to run but your legs either won't get into a proper rhythm or weigh half a ton each?

If the world of Killer of Sheep is a dream, the characters are the sleepers, a party--through their obliviousness--to their own wretchedness. In this world, Stan, who does not sleep, is a hero. He even manages to get small moments of enjoyment out of his life, comparing the feel of a mug of coffee on his cheek to that of the forehead of a woman with whom one is making love, or exchanging a rare smile with his daughter over a southern expression: the rain is caused by "the devil beating his wife." In the closing shots of the film, when Stan shouts noiselessly at the sheep, is he performing a routine part of his job, or is he--as I like to think--exhorting the sheep, and by extension his fellow humans, to wake up and pay attention?

Hard to know. Better, perhaps, to simply focus on the movie's beautiful shots. One of them, one of a number of shots of children playing that intersperse the film, shows boys running to throw rocks at a passing train--from the train's point of view. Some of the shots of the sheep are lovely, one of them particularly so, showing them in an almost ghostly light. They look beautiful, these dumb creatures, making all the more heartbreaking what is not far in their future.

From dreams to reality: in the fall of 2007, Milestone released a two-disc DVD set, The Charles Burnett Collection, containing Killer of Sheep, four of Burnett's short films, and his full-length work My Brother's Wedding, first shown in theaters in 1983. If Killer of Sheep represented a one-upping of surrealist filmmakers' treatment of the dream world, then My Brother's Wedding might be said to be Italian neorealism brought to black urban America. Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema, for example, depicted life in a poor Sicilian fishing village, using nonprofessional actors from the village itself to tell the story. Burnett did much the same thing with My Brother's Wedding (and Killer of Sheep, for that matter), using locals to portray conditions in an impoverished black Los Angeles neighborhood. There, Pierce (Everett Silas), a thirty-year-old employee of his parents' dry-cleaning store, is torn between the upward mobility of his brother and soon-to-be-sister-in-law (which he views as selling out) and the wild ways of his best friend, Soldier (Ronnie Bell), who has just gotten out of prison. Burnett even manages a subtlety missing from La Terra Trema, which relied on a voiceover to explain what was before our eyes (to be fair, the Sicilian dialect was reportedly hard to make out even in Italy). My Brother's Wedding evokes, without comment, the contrast between the older neighborhood residents' religious values and the danger of the environment where they find themselves; hence the behavior of Pierce's elderly relatives, who interrupt their Bible reading to pick up a gun so they can answer the door.

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My Brother's Wedding unfortunately suffers from patches of clumsy dialog and from wretched acting. (Somehow bad performances work better in unintelligible Sicilian.) Worse, those shortcomings do not detract from an otherwise solid story--rather, they distract us from the film's failure to answer a basic question: why is the seemingly normal, generally easygoing Pierce friends with an apparent sociopath whom everybody else would like to see back in the joint? What makes My Brother's Wedding worth watching, though, is its success at exploring what has been called "the universal in the particular." Burnett takes on the everywhere-understood concept of the generation gap, as it exists in a particular time and place and under a specific set of circumstances--the clash of older people's southern values with the nihilism of their progeny in the big bad city--and examines one young man's struggle to reconcile the things he has been told by his elders and the things he has seen for himself.

As for the shorts, The Horse, a moody, mysterious work from 1973, is the best from a visual perspective; some shots of the doomed animal of the title, in particular, rival the photography in Killer of Sheep. Speaking of that film, another of the shorts--Several Friends (1969)--could pass, I do not exaggerate, for a series of Sheep's outtakes. In Quiet as Kept (2007), a family of displaced Hurricane Katrina victims muses about the lessons the disaster has taught them about America. In my earlier piece on Burnett, discussing another of his films, I wrote, "Drama and political message can dance well together, provided drama leads. Here, it struggles in vain to keep up." That assessment applies word for word to Quiet as Kept.

In terms of storytelling, the best of the shorts is When It Rains, from 1995. In it, a woman with a young daughter is threatened with eviction for nonpayment of rent. Desperate, she hurries to a nearby outdoor mall, where, amidst a music festival, she finds her friend Babu (playing himself). With his graying dreadlocks and African-style clothing, Babu looks like a kind of wise village elder; the truth, as we gradually discover, is slightly different. As Babu circulates among his acquaintances, trying with mixed success to raise the money for his friend's rent, he comes to seem less like an all-knowing figure and more like an ordinary but large-hearted guy willing to drop what he's doing to help the good people around him. At one point, money fresh in hand from a sympathetic acquaintance, he is set upon--before he can take a step--by another fellow, who calls in a previous loan. In the end, Babu succeeds in helping his friend not through wisdom, but, as he acknowledges with good humor in the voice-over narration, through pure dumb luck--but hey, he'll take it. A funny, sweet little film, When It Rains contains the message found in some of Burnett's best work: that in a tough world, the wise enjoy what they can, and are grateful for that.

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(1) Thompson's article, "The Devil Beats His Wife: Small Moments and Big Statements in the Films of Charles Burnett," appeared in Cineaste, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, and was reprinted in The Best American Movie Writing 1999 (St. Martin's Griffin).

Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection is a two-disc special edition DVD including the feature films Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, and the short films Several Friends, The Horse, When It Rains and Quiet as Kept. Distributed by Milestone Film Film & Video, www.milestonefilms.com.