Charles Burnett is an African American filmmaker associated with the L.A. Rebellion, the group of filmmakers who studied at UCLA in the 1970s and built a body of independent work about Black life largely outside the Hollywood studio system. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1944 and raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, he shot Killer of Sheep in Watts on weekends between 1972 and 1973, submitting it in 1977 as his master’s thesis project at UCLA.
For Killer of Sheep, Burnett combined the roles of writer, director, producer, cinematographer and editor. The film follows a Black slaughterhouse worker in Watts trying to hold his family together, and UCLA’s film archive calls it one of the L.A. Rebellion’s most widely celebrated films. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1990.
Recognition arrived while the film industry was still catching up. In 1988, Burnett received a MacArthur Fellowship, and he later became the first filmmaker connected to the L.A. Rebellion to receive an honorary Academy Award, accepting the Honorary Award at the Governors Awards on November 11, 2017. His other features include My Brother’s Wedding, The Glass Shield and To Sleep with Anger, in which Danny Glover plays a visitor whose arrival unsettles a Los Angeles family. To Sleep with Anger brought the film an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Feature and won Independent Spirit Awards including Best Director for Burnett, with the National Society of Film Critics giving Burnett its award for Best Screenplay. In 2017 it too joined the National Film Registry.
Burnett’s work also includes documentaries such as America Becoming and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, along with the short When It Rains.
