For three long decades, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a fictional portrait of a working-class black family living in a broken-down home in a bombed-out stretch of Los Angeles, has been largely hidden from view. Shot in Watts in the early ’70s and completed in 1977, the film was Mr. Burnett’s M.F.A. thesis project and never meant for a commercial release. He operated the 16mm camera himself, edited the black-and-white images into a visual poem and added the ballads, the jazz and the moody blues that seep into your head like smoke. The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone … Mr. Burnett has a wonderful eye, and his ability to create harmonious compositions from the free-form chaos of the streets brings to mind the work of photographers like Helen Levitt and Robert Frank, best known for his collection The Americans. The Los Angeles neighborhood where most of Killer of Sheep takes place feels less alienated than the 1950s country discovered by Mr. Frank in his landmark book. But, like this Swiss-born photographer, Mr. Burnett is able to capture both the surface beauty of the world and its pessimism, perhaps because, as a black American, he also knows what it means to be a stranger in a strange land … At once plot-free and carefully shaped, the film unfolds as a series of interludes involving the family’s children, the mother and father and the friends and strangers who pass through their lives … The brutal poetry of the film’s title – Stan, we come to realize, is both the butcher and the butchered – finds echoes in Mr. Burnett’s sun-blasted landscapes and cramped interiors. Killer of Sheep has often been compared to the classics of Italian neo-realism, a comparison born out in the documentary like authenticity of its milieu, Mr. Burnett’s use of non professional actors and commitment to the representation of unadorned life. But there is more to neo-realism than formalist gestures; context counts too, and much like the characters in Rossellini’s Open City, Stan and his family are casualties of war. This may be Mr. Burnett’s most radical truth-telling. In Killer of Sheep, the characters’ identities as African-Americans are material and existential givens, while poverty is the equal-opportunity destroyer.

Manohla Dargis, Whereabouts in Watts? Where Poetry Meets Chaos, “New York Times”, 30 March 2007