Neo-realism meets the blues in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep
2011; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.14198/qdcine.2011.7.10
ISSN1888-4571
Autores Tópico(s)Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Resumo…the very existence of the blues tradition is irrefutable evidence that those who evolved it respond to the vicissitudes of the human condition not with hysterics and desperation, but through the wisdom of poetry informed by pragmatic insight" (Murray, 1996: 208-209).Although little known outside of critics' circles and dedicated cineastes, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) "remains to this day a near mythic object, one of the first fifty films inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry" (Foundas, Independent Lens: Charles Burnett, in Kapsis (ed.) 2011:138).The film "tenderly recounts a few days in the life of a slaughterhouse worker, Stan (Henry G. Sanders), whose existence is as bounded by invisible threads of hopelessness as that of the sheep that he is forced to kill each day" (Hozic, The House I live In: An Interview with Charles Burnett, in Kapsis, 2011: 75).During its brief theatrical release in 1977, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin dismissed Killer of Sheep as "amateurish" and 'boring'.Since then, the film has won awards at festivals and "acquired honorary protection by the National Film Registry accorded to a select few 'masterpieces' such as Citizen Kane, and aided its author in winning a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship", popularly known as the "genius award" (Hozic, 2011: 75).In addition to being selected as one of America's fifty most culturally significant films, the film was named one of the "100 Most Influential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film and gained critical acclaim in Europe.Burnett told film critic Terrence Rafferty in 2001, "It just takes an extraordinary effort to keep going when everybody's saying to you, ' No one wants to see that kind of movie' or 'there's no black audience" (Kapsis, Interviews: Charles Burnett, 2011: ix).The story of this film's 30-year journey from cult classic to re-release by Milestone Films in theaters and on DVD in 2008 is the story of its music in many ways.To pull together the $150,000 for co-
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