Short(er) Films by Charles Burnett (Patreon)

Several Friends (1969)

A meandering portrait of Black life in South Central L.A., Several Friends could be seen as a dry run for Killer of Sheep, although that would sell it short. The film, as you might expect, features a group of friends who plan to spend the day drinking and hanging out, possibly going to see a movie, until a minor incident flares up. Nothing much happens in Several Friends, but it's teeming with atmosphere and joyous, sardonic bickering and verbal oneupmanship. It's too well performed to come across as a mere slice-of-life piece, but it does convey a casualness that establishes Burnett as an American heir to Italian Neo-realism. More than any other Burnett film, Several Friends suggests the specific influence that this filmmaker had on Kevin Jerome Everson.

The Horse (1973)

This is probably Burnett's least overtly realist film, which is interesting because it's also the film of his that spends the most running time focusing on white people. A group of dissolute Southern men chew the fat and stare off into the distance while a young Black boy (Maury Wright) comforts a horse in a field. By the end of the film, we discover that the horse is ill, and the boy's father Ray (Larry Clark) is coming home to shoot it. This strikes me as Burnett's clearest allegory for Black culture as a tragic spectacle for White America, an arena of life and death that we just passively observe, as if it were completely separate from us.

When It Rains (1995)

I'd seen When It Rains before, having tracked it down after seeing it on Jonathan Rosenbaum's "essential movies" list. I did admire it a lot when I saw it 10+ years ago, but I have a new appreciation for it now. That's not just because I can better see how it fits into Burnett's overall cinematic worldview. It's also a remarkable portrait of community and selflessness, showing a guy from the neighborhood (Ayuko Babu) spending a day hustling to try and raise some rent money for a woman (Florence Bracy) in danger of eviction. The only real action in the film involves the man having different degrees of luck / lucklessness in convincing other people to help a stranger. In the end, community itself, and not necessarily money, turn out to be the solution to the problem. ("I'm glad I wasn't holding a rap record," he says, another Burnett dig at hip-hop.) This would make a wonderful double-feature with Hal Hartley's short feature Meanwhile.

The Final Insult (1997)

Really more of a featurette than a short, The Final Insult is one of Burnett's most fully realized works, and shows what he can do when he's able to secure that rare combination of independence and a budget. Although shot in L.A., The Final Insult was funded by Germany's ZDF network and although it's a low-budget production that looks just a hair above consumer-grade video, it's performed and edited with a high degree of subtlety and skill. It's an experimental docu-fiction about homelessness in L.A., and without the time and care that Burnett obviously took with this project, it could have been either cloying or exploitative. Unlike, say, Nomadland, The Final Insult is neither.

Burnett gives us a narrative throughline and a primary protagonist by the name of Box Brown (Ayuko Babu), a middle-aged bank analysis who was laid off and eventually lost his home due to an exorbitant IRS judgment against him. While living out of his unreliable old car, Brown still works as a freelance consultant at a Bank of America branch, ironically helping them to downsize their own staff. Along the way, Burnett introduces us to various homeless folks living in various degrees of desperation. In a way, the project is primarily about giving these people space to be seen and heard, and the Box Brown story is a framework Burnett uses to make that happen.

As an artwork in itself, however, The Final Insult is fairly interesting, especially in the way Burnett depicts class consciousness vs, identity politics. Brown's most immediate threats on the street come from younger Black men, and one can see that Burnett has a high degree of skepticism about Black youth culture's preoccupation with "getting paid." The braggadocio of rap music serves here as a metonym for a selfishness that functions as capitalism's funhouse-mirror reflection. It's also possible that Burnett sees himself in Box Brown, beaten down by a younger generation that has no use for tradition, but I wouldn't presume to psychoanalyze either the man or the film.

Quiet As Kept (2007)

Another Burnett short I'd seen before, although unlike When It Rains, this one didn't really open up on second viewing. I didn't like it when it came out, and I still don't really like it. There's an unnerving combination of blatant didacticism and cheap-ass videography here, each failing further undermining the other. One senses that this was an important film for Burnett to make -- it's about a frustrated family in L.A. who were relocated from New Orleans after Katrina -- but a lot of the political and generational struggle that underpins Burnett's work is just stated outright, making Quiet As Kept a bit of a cinematic op-ed piece. It remains interesting, though, as an example of the inner workings of an auteur. Most of the usual ingredients of Burnett's work are here, but they just don't come together like they usually do.