Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett (born April 13, 1944, Vicksburg, Mississippi, U.S.) is an American filmmaker who gained critical acclaim for his realistic and intimate portrayals of African American families. Burnett’s films, most of which he wrote as well as directed, were revered by critics yet rarely enjoyed any commercial success. Two of his movies were added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry: Killer of Sheep (1977) in 1990 and To Sleep with Anger (1990) in 2017.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Burnett grew up in the Watts district of Los Angeles. After high school, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College, planning a career as an electrician. However, he soon changed his mind and began studying creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a master’s degree in filmmaking in the 1970s. He started filming his first feature-length movie, Killer of Sheep, as his thesis film. The movie was completed in 1973 but not publicly screened until 1977; a restored version was released by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2007. It is a collection of vignettes centring on a slaughterhouse worker and his struggling family in Watts.

A 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Burnett to begin production on his second feature film, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), a portrait of a working-class family in Los Angeles. It focuses on a young man deciding whether to attend the wedding of his upwardly mobile brother. In 1988 Burnett received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which provided him with the financial support to make To Sleep with Anger (1990), another portrait of an African American family coming to grips with both its past and its present. It starred Danny Glover as a mysterious visitor who insinuates himself into the family, who come to realize that he is the embodiment of evil. To Sleep with Anger gained widespread critical acclaim and was Burnett’s first film to enjoy a modicum of commercial success. The Glass Shield (1994), about a black cop (played by Michael Boatman) working with a racist police unit, was Burnett’s first major commercial effort, but it enjoyed only limited success.

Burnett subsequently turned to television and documentary films and in 1996 made the highly praised Nightjohn, a fictional TV movie about American slaves teaching themselves to read. Another television movie, The Wedding (1998), starring Halle Berry, focuses on an interracial couple in the 1950s and is based on a story by Dorothy West. Selma, Lord, Selma (1999) is about the 1965 civil rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama. In the children’s TV movie Finding Buck McHenry (2000), a kid trying to form a baseball team believes his school custodian played for the Negro leagues. Burnett’s documentaries included America Becoming (1991), about immigration; Warming by the Devil’s Fire (2003), part of a TV series about blues music; and Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), about the life and legacy of the title figure.

Burnett returned to feature films with The Annihilation of Fish (1999), an offbeat romance featuring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, and he subsequently made Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007), a drama about Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s first president. Burnett’s later credits included the short film Quiet as Kept (2007), centring on a family that relocates after Hurricane Katrina; the TV movie Relative Stranger (2009), a drama about a football player and his struggles to reconnect with the family he deserted; and the TV documentary Power to Heal: Medicare and the Civil Rights Revolution (2018). Burnett received an honorary Academy Award in 2018 for his body of work.