From Street to Screen

Charles Burnett's 1977 film, Killer of Sheep is one of the towering classics of African American cinema. As a deliberate counterpoint to popular blaxploitation films of the period, it combines harsh images of the banality of everyday oppression with scenes of lyrical beauty, and depictions of stark realism with flights of comic fancy. From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is the first book-length collection dedicated to the film and designed to introduce viewers to this still relatively unknown masterpiece. Beginning life as Burnett's master's thesis project in 1973, and shot on a budget of $10,000, Killer of Sheep immediately became a cornerstone of the burgeoning movement in African American film that came to be known variously as the LA School or LA Rebellion. By bringing together a wide variety of material, this volume covers both the politics and aesthetics of the film as well as its deeper social and contextual histories. This expansive and incisive critical companion will serve equally as the perfect starting point and standard reference for all viewers, whether they are already familiar with the film or coming to it for the first time.

Michael T. Martin is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. He is editor or coeditor of seven anthologies, and (with David C. Wall) The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man and Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. He also directed and coproduced the award-winning feature documentary on Nicaragua In the Absence of Peace, distributed by Third World Newsreel.David C. Wall is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Utah State University. He edited (with Michael T. Martin) The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man and Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Other recent work can be found in Nineteenth-Century Studies and A Companion to the Historical Film.