If there's a narrative in Killer of Sheep, you have to make it up for yourself. There are vignettes of Stan, his wife, his children, and the others in their crumbling black Los Angeles neighborhood. Maybe it's in Stan's despairing attempts at making something, anything, work. His face and eyes look befuddled by everything he touches. Fixing the plumbing. Getting a check cashed. Hauling a car engine into his truck (but leaving it untethered, so that it falls and breaks as soon as he puts the truck in gear). He's always on the verge of stopping and crying. He seems to be unable to do anything well -- except for his horrible work at the slaughterhouse. There he looks sharp. He looks adept.
Like classic Italian films, the camera loves the people: the thugs stealing a TV, the stern old man who watches them over the fence, the fat prostitute, the boy that gets hit by a rock and cries while the others keep throwing.
I don't see the film as being about "black people." It's about Stan. Stan and his wife. His wife's attempts to break through his morose demeanor. It's terrible in some ways. A film without a driving narrative feels bleak. The last scene if of the sheep Stan is driving through a gate, a bottleneck, where they struggle, jump and fight over each other to go through the gate, to get inside to what's waiting for them.
We saw the film at the MFA on Saturday. There weren't many black faces in the sparse crowd. Maybe a couple. I had expected many more. The MFA doesn't attract many black faces, in general.
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