Charles Burnett’s deep-layered 1990 To Sleep with Anger brought his filmmaking talents to momentary public awareness and kindled interest in his earlier work, but Burnett got lost in the shuffle again. Fortunately, Killer of Sleep, his UCLA film school student thesis which has gathered awards around the festival and college circuit for three decades, is about to finally receive its first theatrical release.

Included along with Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree among the initial fifty selections under the 1988 National Film Preservation Act and, with To Sleep with Anger, voted by critics as one of the hundred most essential films ever, this début feature from a man admired in circles as “the nation’s most gifted black director,” has been kept from theaters by questions over rights to the terrific blues compilation soundtrack -- eclectic from the little-known to Dinah Washington and Paul Robeson -- and perhaps by moviegoers’ preference at the time for blaxploitation and, today, for slightly more rounded African-American law enforcement figures.

For, relaxed to the point of decidedly uneven pacing, Killer of Sheep has no “hero” as such. Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) is at the center, but the true protagonist is a community, a depressed but calm post-1965 riots Watts, incarnated in several of its residents in casually connected vignettes. Surnameless Everymen played mostly by friends and other amateurs, they are inarticulate in putting precise words to the failure of the dream even back in times of relative hope. Granted, the nation’s mood had begun to sour in the previous decades’ war and assassinations, but people still believed, therefore were all the more bewildered, way before the era of shrinking expectations and widening gaps.

“Supposed to be naturalistic,” sometimes termed America’s neorealism and evocative of early Cassavetes, the partly improvisational technique is almost street-guerrilla. Intellectually provocative, tonally contrasting and highlighting body language over difficult, sparse dialogue, using silence as Big Bill Broonzy did in his music, it forces audiences to connect the dots. Not a strident condemnation of racism -- though one cannot help but be aware of what had gone down before and was to come -- Killer of Sheep probes the lives, not of today’s street culture, but of the working-class poor in their threadbare existence.

There is warm silliness, and humor -- women’s comments to a glowing at-long-last pregnant friend, extempore pre-rap rap on a foiled excursion to the racetrack ; and beauty in Stan’s bare-chested virtually motionless dance with his unnamed sexually rejected wife (Kaycee Moore), and sadness in her tears and voiceover memory of a girlhood Down South; there is American recognition that, rakes in their Afros, ghetto kids, too, rode bikes and wore high-top Keds, tossed stones at freight trains and dirt clods at forts of construction-site leftovers, and that, bigger and more mature, girls could send the boys home crying.

The bittersweet of life in concrete time and place is not merely evoked, but intensified in the select sound of blues, rough and rural or jazzy and upscale city, the granddaddy of our music forms and our heart’s mixture of pain and happiness, despair and hope. “Lord, you know sometimes I’m almost to the ground . . . nobody knows,” “but I won’t be blue always.”

Barely keeping above water in his modest house through a sheep-slaughterhouse job, Stan turns down extra cash as a non-participant accomplice in a murder plan but withdraws further from the wife who tongue-lashes the two would-be killers and tells him to “use your brain. You be a man, Stan.” Unknowingly mired in the midlife bog that dogs men of all colors, he can feebly though lovingly smile at young daughter Angela (Angela Burnett), is less responsive to her older brother Stan, Jr. (Jack Drummond), and finds soul commitment in low-key camaraderie with Oscar, Bracy (Burnett’s high school friend and film companion Charles Bracy) and Gene (Eugene Cherry).

Another unable to repay him and sneering, “All I got’s my good looks,” they are so strapped that he and car-fanatic Gene have all they can do to pool the fifteen dollars with which, together with the shirt off Gene’s back, to buy an old engine in an apartment of hilarious self-pitiers. The engine crushes a finger and, anyway, falls immediately from the Chevy pickup and breaks. And so it goes, even to the anticipated, abortive multi-family outing to bet on the ponies at Los Alomitos.

Poignant and telling but not depressing, this depiction of people going about the business of living is, on purpose, on an even keel. Joys are momentary, to be snatched at. In 35 mm restoration by Burnett’s film alma mater, this exhilaration of cinema in its basics, and at its best, will at last be available for a wide public, thanks to distribution by boutique Milestone Film & Video, which also arranged the private pre-release showing at the Museum of Modern Art. 

(Released by Mileston Films; not rated by MPAA.)