Ray Pride

Antonioni: morte. Bergman: dead. Quick, crack open some Woody Allen, would you? "Some people hope to achieve immortality through their works or their children. I would prefer to achieve it by not dying," the student of 1950s-1960s art-house pictures observed. "I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens."

Time offers unexpected gifts (if you live long enough). When I arrived for school in Chicago as an 18-year-old, I’d just begun to see movies and immediately made all sorts of discoveries. But I was also reading a reviewer who was less than ten years older than me who had two directors he hated, hated, hated, the most, in a way that seemed like he was trying to make a name, but he's stayed consistent in his public loathing for Fellini and Bergman. Here’s the gift: I steered away from those guys until my late twenties and early thirties, thus completely having a young man's perception of them, seeing them from an as-yet-incompletely formed sensibility. When I watched them all grown up? They were thunder-striking revelations. "Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class" and "Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde clichés." I will be eternally grateful for that young man’s old-man curmudgeonly contrarianism.

Bergman’s movies will likely outlast words like those. As will Charles Burnett’s "Killer of Sheep." Lost masterpieces are a rarer sort. There are gargantuan follies and genuinely lost epics in film history, such as "The Magnificent Ambersons" and the complete, full-length "Greed," and movies which had earlier cuts, like the rude bootleg that once circulated of Jonathan Demme’s terrific director’s cut of "Swing Shift." This fall, we’re getting the definitive "Blade Runner" set, five DVDs, five different cuts of the film. Rivette’s epic "Out 1," twelve-and-a-half-hours that only exists in one 16mm print, played the Siskel over Memorial Day and Los Angeles this past weekend. All auspicious, but one of the great, bracing events of the year is what amounts not only to a restoration, but to salvation for a movie that screenwriter and novelist Michael Tolkin has spoken up for (as has Steven Soderbergh in placing his name on the poster as a presenter), "If ‘Killer of Sheep’ were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized."

That’s hard to top. Charles Burnett’s great, fluky, lyrical, post-neo-realist, nearly lost, eighty-minute valentine of verisimilitude to 1970s Watts and to the struggles of the American working class is a 16mm student film, black-and-white with offhanded yet lyrical photography (yet always of documentary intensity), shot over a year of weekends for about $10,000, but it is a loving, attentive dream, detailed with the rhythms of a life almost none of us have lived. Music rights held up its release for years. Explains diligent distributor Milestone Films, "‘Killer of Sheep’ never saw widespread commercial distribution due to the expense of the clearing of the music rights to the songs featured on the film’s soundtrack" despite it being named a "national treasure" in 1990 by The Library of Congress.

Not that this film was hidden away, footage in danger of rot and loss, but think of the dozens of movies like this that could and should have been made by potential filmmakers who were not as industrious as the young Burnett. Thousands of video-captured movies are likely made every day today and no matter how fluent or stark they are, made on modest means, the inevitable shifts in standards for less-than-stable magnetic media will almost certainly insure a fate worse than the one that almost befell this oft-magical gem. There’s no National YouTube Registry and there never will be: a few impassioned power surges, a few endemic failures of swathes of the electrical grid, and all would be wiped clean, or at best, left at the quality of a VHS tape left in a Los Angeles crash pad couch cushion for ten years.

So hooray for Criterion preserving the films of Bergman and Antonioni, larding the DVDs with footnotes and features galore, and let us commend Milestone Films and the UCLA Film & Television Archive for this 35mm blowup with a judiciously cleaned-up soundtrack. "Killer of Sheep" was in fact rotting when UCLA got the materials in 2000. As explained in the Milestone press notes, "The original 16mm A/B rolls as well as the magnetic soundtrack master suffered from vinegar syndrome, a degenerative and purportedly irreversible ‘disease’ that attacks the film, giving off an acid odor in the process, putting the film on a ticking clock." This will not be the fortune in thirty years of the great volume of what’s getting shot today, filled with heart and hope and the particulars of the lives of ordinary Americans. We’ll always have Bergman and Antonioni and copies of the digital masters of "Zodiac" are supposedly stored in multiple caves around the nation, but "Killer of Sheep," while a cause of celebration, is also a reminder of how much we lose in our cultural history every day of the year.

"Killer of Sheep" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2007-07-31)

Also by Ray Pride

Somewhere Over the Rainbo
A reformed Rainbo Club regular visiting from out of town always calls this Ukrainian Village mainstay a "self-selecting slum-ocracy," but on his current visit he’s fixed on but one thing: "The ugly bus pulled up outside, and it’s got big wheels"
(2007-07-24)

The Odyssey
While almost all of the roaring eighty-eight minutes of "The Simpsons Movie" was fresh to me, the reason why is also the reason why some fast-moving bits and details were lost to me: I’ve seldom seen more than five minutes of the series in all its years on the air
(2007-07-24)

Tip of the Week
Canadian artists descend upon the fallen world: "Manufactured Landscapes," Deborah Baichwal’s memorable, stately, often-stunning documentary, follows Canadian fine arts landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky to China, where he captures beautiful, large-scale images in large format of the epic damage man wreaks on nature
(2007-07-24)

Space Odyssey
Scots-born director Danny Boyle’s protean imagination tends to the tactile, the immediate, the blood-rushing, the trippy: think "Trainspotting," "Miracles," "28 Days Later" and its sequel, "28 Weeks Later," which he supervised. His latest, "Sunshine," is no different, tending more toward the mind-expanding drift of "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the "Solaris" of Tarkovsky and of Soderbergh or the claustrophobia of "Das Boot" or "Wages of Fear" than to the pop-pow of "Armageddon."
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-17)

Bombs Away
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
(2007-07-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-10)

Well Enough in the Margins
(2007-07-10)

Bay Watching
(2007-07-02)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-02)

More Moore
(2007-06-26)

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