So as you may recall, I watched all the movies in the 2012 Sight & Sound Great Movies list. Well, in the 2022 version of that list, there are some movies added that weren’t there before, and I feel like I ought to make myself current.

A few months ago, I saw Meshes of the Afternoon, new at 16. I’d previously watched Cléo from 5 to 7 at 14 (which I always forget wasn’t on the 2012 list because of course it had to have been!), Do the Right Thing, at 24, Daisies at 28, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire at 30. So this was the next one up for me, at 43.

The backstory to this movie is that it was made in 1978 as director Charles Burnett’s UCLA film school master’s thesis, for $10,000. And then it wasn’t released because he’d used music in it that he couldn’t possibly afford (which really does work in the movie, so there’s a reason it wasn’t just removed). So for decades, it was apparently this kind of underground indie-film totem that people would see at film festivals (from increasingly dire 16mm prints) and it built up a reputation in film snob circles. And then in 2007, what with it being kind of an established classic, UCLA paid for a restoration and someone donated $150K to clear the music rights, and it finally got a real release. And so now it’s “widely” available, by which I mean it’s on Kanopy, and if your library doesn’t have Kanopy, welp, Pirate Bay for you.

And so as you look at that list of movies that are new to the list in 2022, you’ll notice that all of them are either by a Black or female director, and Charles Burnett is not a woman, so yeah: This is a portrait of Watts and the people who live there. It doesn’t have much of a story, but focuses particularly on one family: We see the dad at home, tired from his job, but loving his wife and children; we see him at his job, where he is slaughtering sheep[1]; and we see the kids, both with their family, and roving the neighborhood playing kid games like throwing rocks at each other in a kind of mock-war.

Because I didn’t read anything about the movie going in, I kept expecting a story to develop, and by the time it got to the end, I was wondering if I’d missed some kind of subtext or something; but no, this is just a slice of life, a kind of quasi-documentary of a fictional family’s life. (The movie’s been compared to Italian neo-realism in that it uses amateur actors to tell a very realistic story about people living in tough situations, and I can buy it.)

The one thing I found a little frustrating is that the audio quality is terrible. The restorers deliberately didn’t do anything to make the film more highly-produced than it originally was, but apparently in the original production, the kids held the mics during scenes when they weren’t acting, and turns out there’s a reason why professional film productions don’t hire kids to be their sound technicians. In a lot of scenes, you can barely hear what anyone is saying; I’m not a captions guy, but I was tempted here. (And certainly this contributed to my feeling that I might have missed a plot at the end.)

A thing I often find with movies like this, is that while I’m watching them, I’m like “enh, it’s not bad, but I don’t know if I really get why it’s considered a classic/great film,” and then days later (aka now) I’ll still be thinking about it, and scenes will be rattling around in my head. So even though I didn’t walk away from it feeling particularly impressed, at this point, I’d say that yeah, this is exactly the kind of movie that belongs on the S&S list, and is a deserved classic.

  1. I 100% thought the title was going to be metaphorical and at first I was waiting for the speech where someone gave some biblical parable about killing sheep or whatever; and then they had a slaughterhouse scene, and I was like… oh! Okay then! (Also, this is one of the few non-horror movies that has a convincing slaughterhouse scene; I think it being in black and white keeps it from being too shockingly gory.) ↩︎