Charles Burnett (b. April 13, 1944, Vicksburg, Mississippi) is a MacArthur Award-winning American filmmaker, educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. is the 103rd day of the year (104th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... Vicksburg is a city in Warren County, Mississippi. ... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, generally known as UCLA, is a public university whose main campus is located in the affluent Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. ...

Burnett's style is rarely violent and his most original work concentrates on the lives of the African American middle class. His first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), was made while he was a graduate student at UCLA. Though it was never given a wide release at the time and remained hard-to-come-by through subsequent decades (because of its unauthorized use of music in the soundtrack), it became a touchstone film in American cinema; it has been declared a national treasure by the Library of Congress and was among the first 50 films placed on the US National Registry.^[1] In 2007 the soundtrack rights were at last cleared and the film was given a belated wide release. An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... Killer of Sheep is a 1977 film that depicts the culture of urban African-Americans; the film is considered an alternative to Blaxploitation films. ... The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. ...

Burnett's other credits include My Brother's Wedding, To Sleep with Anger, and The Annihilation of Fish.

Bibliography

• Massood, Paula J., "An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse", Wide Angle - Volume 21, Number 4, October 1999, pp. 20-41
• Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema, ed. by George Alexander, Janet Hill, New York : Harlem Moon, 2003.

Wide Angle (1999) is the debut album by British breakbeat trance producers Hybrid, re-released in 2000 as a double-CD edition entitled Wider Angle. ...

Notes

1. ^ Review of Killer of Sheep by Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.com

External links

• Charles Burnett at the Internet Movie Database
• Interviews with Charles Burnett
• http://www.annihilationoffish.com/pages/makers/burnett.html
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database