Sight Unseen Recommendation: Killer of Sheep

I try to avoid touting the virtues of films I have never seen, but two of my favorite reviewers, Dana Stevens of Slate and David Denby of The New Yorker have written glowing reviews in anticipation of the DVD release of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. Denby's succinct, almost austere haiku of a review hints at pleasures to be savored, as he writes:

The film has attained legendary status, but it has never been released theatrically before, because of music-rights issues. Burnett used many kinds of African-American music on the soundtrack, and the movie itself has the bedraggled eloquence of an old blues record.

Stevens' review is more emotionally involved, and is charged with the experience of many remembered joys in viewing the film:

Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's Pickpocket or De Sica's Bicycle Thieves for the first time. Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series The Wire.

Killer of Sheep is a collection of brief vignettes which are so loosely connected that it feels at times like you're watching a non-narrative film. But each of these moving parts has a necessary function, and when the movie's brief 87 minutes are up, you want to watch the whole thing over again to see how they all fit together.

With such varied tones in expressing essentially delight at its impending release, this movie certainly seems worth seeing. I hope it makes its way to Philippine shores. Calling Joey Fernandez!

Picture comes courtesy of Jeroen Koolhaas, in The New Yorker.