Charles Burnett (director)
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Charles Burnett (April 13, 1944, Vicksburg, Mississippi) is a MacArthur Award-winning American filmmaker. Like many black families, his parents decided to leave Mississippi for California in the Great Migration, in search of jobs in the booming defense industry and better living conditions, including the chance to vote. Burnett grew up in Los Angeles, California in Watts. He earned a bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Burnett's style is rarely violent. His most original work concentrates on the lives of the African-American middle-class, who were seldom treated in films. He made his first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), while a graduate student at UCLA. Though the film was not given a wide release at the time and remained hard-to-come-by through subsequent decades (because of its unauthorized use of music in the soundtrack), it became a touchstone film among knowledgeable people in American cinema. In 1990, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2007, the soundtrack rights were at last cleared, and the film was given a wide release.
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[edit] Filmography
- Several Friends (short, 1969)
- The Horse (short, 1973)
- Killer of Sheep (1977)
- My Brother's Wedding (1983)
- To Sleep with Anger (1990)
- America Becoming (1991)
- The Glass Shield (1994)
- When It Rains (short, 1995)
- Nightjohn (TV, 1996)
- The Wedding (TV, 1998)
- Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland (short, 1998)
- Selma, Lord, Selma (TV, 1999)
- Olivia's Story (short, 2000)
- The Annihilation of Fish (1999)
- Finding Buck McHenry (TV, 2000)
- Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003)
- For Reel? (TV, 2003)
- The Blues: Warming by the Devil's Fire (2003)
- Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007)
- Red Soil (2008)
[edit] Bibliography
- Massood, Paula J., "An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse", Wide Angle - Volume 21, Number 4, October 1999, pp. 20-41
- Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema, ed. by George Alexander, Janet Hill, New York : Harlem Moon, 2003.
