By Anayanci De Paz
The L.A. Rebellion was a group of independent Black student filmmakers who during the late 1960’s to the mid-1980’s created some of the most powerful, revolutionary films which illustrated the beauty and humanity within Black people and their communities. The main goal of the L.A. Rebellion was to create a New Black Cinema: Black-oriented, firmly grounded in Black aesthetic traditions, and less dependent on Hollywood models of race that portrayed a Manichean and racist worldview. The L.A. Rebellion forged a New Black Cinema which celebrated multiple, differing, and intersecting Black voices and narratives, uncovered the structural oppression that Black communities face in the United States, and provided meaningful reflection on the past and present lives of Black people. The L.A. Rebellion was introduced to Third World Cinema theory, mode of production, and narrative and formal developments through the UCLA professor, Elyseo Taylor. Being Taylor’s teaching assistant, Charles Burnett built a strong connection to Third World Cinema goals.
Third World Cinema aims to create films that inspire self-realization within the neocolonialized spectator in order to emancipate themselves from a paternalistic relationship that encourages the belief of one’s own inferiority to the dominant culture. Third Cinema transforms the spectator into an actor of resistance; in decolonizing the spectator’s mode of perception, the neocolonialized subject is deconstructed as self-realization leads to the creation of another comrade committed to the fight towards universal liberation for all people. In the words of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, two of the originators of the movement: “...it provides discovery through transformation.”
Charles Burnett’s film, Killer of Sheep (1978, released in 2017), is an excellent example of a film that provides discovery through transformation. Killer of Sheep tells the story of Stan, a devoted husband, father, worker, friend, and neighbor who has migrated his family from the Southeast of the United Statesto California, in South Central L.A, Watts district. Although the film centers on Stan, a community story is also told through his relationships to those around him; Stan’s commitment to his morals and values under the structural oppression that he and his community face is a celebration of the courage, compassion, and beauty within Black communities. The film episodically interweaves between following Stan in his different spaces (working in a butcher factory, helping a friend fix up his car, cashing in his check at a liquor store, and spending time at home with his family) and shots of neighborhood children playing in train yards, on top of roofs, and on porches, and shots of masses ofsheep herded through the slaughterhouse where Stan works. Burnett’s film completely rejects a Manichean worldview; instead, Burnett shows real people in real situations referenced from his own life. Burnett uncovers the structural oppression that Black communities face in the United States while revealing the nature of intergenerational trauma. One of these traumas is the violent psychic experience of double consciousness.
In Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, the experience of double consciousness is expressed through the narration, cinematography, and dialogue; the representation of double consciousness provides a framework for understanding the position of oppressed people and reaches out to all spectators to unite each other in liberating ourselves and our U.S. culture from Hollywood’s racially demoralizing and divisive agenda. W.E.B Du Bois’ theory on double consciousness comes from his book,The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of Black folk songs, church songs, personal anecdotes, community stories, U.S. history and politics, and psychic theory. In many ways, Killer of Sheep is like another version of Du Bois’ book; the film updates the African American experience of double consciousness that Du Bois developed at the turn of the 20th century. In a key passage of the book, Du Bois attributes double consciousness of Black people to a modality of self-perception that is mediated through the eyes of the other:
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, --a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, --this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” (8-9)
Double consciousness is the burden of the constant experience and awareness of interpreting oneself through the judgmental and suspicious eyes of the dominant ideology or culture. It seems that the art of film would be a fascinating way to articulate this experience of double consciousness; to see oneself through the eyes of another implies that there is a double spectatorship, one that society views from externally and one that comes from the interior, psychic experience. In the subsequent pages, I will examine how W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory on double consciousness is expressed within Killer of Sheep and how it provides a framework for understanding the position of hegemonically oppressed Black people in the U.S..
The film begins with a sweet and lovely lullaby sung by a child and woman’s voiceover a dark screen. The imagequickly changes to a cold and harsh vignette which shows a boy being violently lectured at by his father and then conclusively slapped by his mother. This vignette shows the generational imperative for children to embrace violence as a developmental part of adulthood. What is also being represented is the psychic violence that the boy must be initiated into through this intergenerational trauma that one carries as double consciousness. The father in the scene states:
I don’t care who started what or whether he was winning or losing you get a stick or, or, or, a goddamn brick. Get anything, and you knock the shit out of whoever’s fighting your brother cuz if anything was to happen to me or your mother, you ain’t got nobody except your brother.
What is beaten into the boy is a “us” versus “them” mentality; right and wrong are linked to family loyalty. If we interpret family loyalty or brotherhood as a commitment to one’s race, one could argue that a double consciousness is created because the subject becomes unable to unite both selves, the American and the Black man. When the world is constructed through a Manichean viewpoint, and races are dehumanizingly classified as “good” or “evil,” the addition of an “us” versus “them” mode of perception can, of course, lead to looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. What the father passes on to his son is also a sense of living under a constant existential threat, which shatters the boy’s childish carefree attitude towards life. In essence, but without any word of explanation, the boy is taught the violence of double consciousness.
