DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The last few years have represented a renaissance for this film, which was quietly legendary for thirty years as a landmark of both independent and African-American cinema that hardly anyone had seen. Director Charles Burnett, working on his first feature (his Master’s Thesis at the UCLA film school) had made the music of prominent artists like Earth, Wind and Fire, Dinah Washington and Paul Robeson an integral part of the fabric of the movie. The only problem: when the film was received with huge acclaim on the festival circuit that warranted a commercial release, Burnett didn’t have the rights procured to any of the songs, and the cost to do so was prohibitive. So the film lived in semi-obscurity until 2007, when the UCLA Archives, Steven Soderbergh and a distributor teamed up to restore the film, settle the rights issue and give the film a proper theatrical and DVD release. The cost 30 years later to license the music? $150,000, or 15 times the film’s original production budget.
After the years of hype, perhaps the most surprising thing is how ably the film lived up to its own outsized legend for the many film lovers who’d been waiting years to see a film that, for many, could only be read about. Burnett harnessed the stark realism of directors from Rossellini to Cassavetes to create a portrait of life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The film centers on Stan, a slaughterhouse worker, and has no plot to speak of. Burnett’s camera simply follows him through the days, small stories and episodes that spring up illustrating an intimate portrait of this one man’s life as an analog for the life of many working-class African Americans. The rough edges of the low-budget production never come off as amateurish; they simply give it the feel of a documentary, but with cameras in places and situations that no documentary camera could ever go.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
