Stolen moments: Bicycle Thieves

By 1948 the war was already three years gone, yet Italy stills looks exhausted—back then, as today, the process of recovery could seem endless. Life went on, grudgingly, chaotically. So in some tattered, flaking, sun-beaten suburb, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) emerges from a mass of jobless men to accept employment pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth. Any work’s to be envied, regardless of how menial, and his peers are far from congratulatory, especially since they all know Antonio doesn’t possess the one item required for the gig: a bicycle. But Antonio rushes off to find his wife Maria (Lianella Carrell), who solves the problem easily enough. She sells their bedclothes. We can sleep without them, she says. The money the sheets gain from the pawnbroker is just enough to get Antonio’s old Fides out of hock.

Antonio’s new career however is short-lived. His Fides is stolen. We were waiting for this, of course, the pay-off on the title. But the pay-off isn’t complete until Antonio and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), a shoeshine boy, have scoured the city streets in search of the thief, and finally, out of pure desperation, Antonio himself becomes a thief. This is the most persuasive point of the movie, that we are all potential bicycle thieves, subordinate to the vagaries of money, opportunity, and luck. Antonio’s story is famously simple: guy loses bike, guy tries to get bike back. Yet the story of Bicycle Thieves lies not just in Antonio’s actions but in the faces, gestures and voices of everyone he encounters, crowds of mostly ordinary, equally struggling people who collectively alternate between moments of solidarity and mercenary measures. The movie starts with Antonio emerging from a crowd and by its end he’ll vanish into the crowd once more. One of my favourite things about Bicycle Thieves is its ambiguity as to whether that crowd is meant to offer any consolation.

Vittorio De Sica directed several films that would become central to the movement known as Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves chief among them. It was shot mostly in real locations, mostly under natural light, with non-professional actors—though their performances are certainly theatrical, you might say very “Italian,” nonetheless. The movie spoke of banality, drudgery, fleeting pleasures, and simple tasks, yet there’s much diversion, and there’s tremendous visual poetry in Carlo Montuori’s fluid camerawork, the images of bikes and ladders flooding the streets, the busy market place, the chorus of street-sweepers, and in an especially memorable scene, men running to take shelter from a downpour while carrying gramophones. De Sica finds beauty in hard times. Some viewers grumble about the aestheticization of poverty, but I’m more concerned with the romanticization of naïveté. I hope I’ve made it clear, should it need repeating, that Bicycle Thieves is of monumental historical importance and is a pretty great movie. The resigned finale, with Maggiorani's speechlessness, is terribly moving. But it’s also a movie that strains a bit for my taste. It’s tough to make a fully fleshed-out story when the story’s trying so hard to make a point. It’s noble to speak for those who have no voice, but it’s precarious too.

It’s instructive to compare Bicycle Thieves not only to, say, the work of Roberto Rossellini, that other great, far harsher Italian neo-realist most famous for Rome: Open City (1945), but also to other movies with similar themes and tactics. Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (50) depicted impoverished kids in Mexico City, but it eschewed the sentimental, embracing petty cruelties and perversion, imbuing characters with greater specificity and greater possibility. Charles Burnett has paid tribute to Bicycle Thieves as a formative influence, but Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (77) portrays the plight of Los Angeles’ downtrodden with far more idiosyncrasy, humour, and personal vision. The Dardenne Brothers, in movies like L’Enfant (05), revitalized neo-realism’s task-oriented narrative structures through a distinctly dogged, rivetingly relentless mise en scene. Most recently, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (08) used the premise of a girl search for a lost dog—a premise superficially similar to De Sica’s Umberto D. (52)—to comment on the status of the non-upwardly mobile or economically disadvantaged in contemporary America. While actually watching Wendy and Lucy I was completely immersed in Wendy’s personal, immediate story—its commentary on the larger social issues started to sink in only later on. By contrast, while watching Bicycle Thieves, for all of its marvels, I could rarely forget that the movie was building a thesis.

Men at Work: Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match and A Hell of a Note arrive on DVD

As the studio-backed auteur films of the 1970s climbed into the stratosphere, those delirious heights from which the whole heady shotgun wedding of art and commerce would soon come crashing down, another American cinema slowly emerged from the rich soil of the marginalized. Independent movies of this second golden age were so often “regional,” if not in geography than in spirit, showing us faces, places and activity typically ignored and doing so through an industrial model infinitely more modest than the one available to the movie brats who conquered Hollywood. These movies were made cheaply and required tireless work, often made on weekends between regular jobs over very long periods of time. Maybe that’s partly why so many of the lasting images of the independents from the 70s concern men at work. From Peter Falk’s convivial crew in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Henry Sanders’ inward abattoir labourer in Killer of Sheep (77), blue-collar life and the poles of wild times and desperate dreams of transcendence it engenders found a new and often exhilarating level of expression. Yet one of the most indelible and entertaining examples of the working man’s movie, one that’s genuinely regional in every sense of the term—save racially—has been long forgotten and is only now making a celebrated return.

Watchmaker Film has lovingly packaged the first DVD release of The Whole Shootin’ Match (78), the feature debut of a scrawny Texan named Eagle Pennell, accompanied by A Hell of a Note (77), his 25-minute dry run which showcases the same inspired comic pairing of actors Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. Authenticity is a precarious word to throw around when discussing movies, but if we invoke it to describe how temperament and tendencies reflect content, than Pennell’s the real thing. He told stories about strangely lovable—and occasionally detestable—losers, dreamers and drinkers whose shaggy charm could never be accused of benefiting from excess polish. And these films, reputedly constructed from single takes, sometimes under-lit, sometimes overexposed, radiate ramshackle enthusiasm. There are bits of humour in Pennell’s work, not to mention certain images of vast landscapes or gloomy bars, that are so instantly winning, yet they’d never satisfy the technical or storytelling standards of even the most slouching film academy. They exude faith in the pleasures of watching human behaviour and in only the most mundane forms of catharsis, blotchy black and white and boom shadows be damned. Their narratives are the narratives of country songs, and they speak to the inner life of the labourer. In one memorable scene, a character watches a movie and sincerely wonders what the director does for a living.

A Hell of a Note announces the sense of flow that is Pennell’s modus operandi. It’s first sequence finds Davis and Perryman resigning from roof tarring in a marvelously fluid gesture: they both whip it out and piss on the as-yet un-tarred roof, their streams of urine converging into a creeping puddle heading strait toward the boots of their cranky and imminently former employer. They then head to a bar to drown sorrows, meet girls, get in awesomely awkward fights, dance, and ponder new opportunities. A sudden injection of tragedy brings it all to a grinding halt, but most of A Hell of a Note is cyclical and un-dramatic, the sense of inevitability kept buoyant by often sublime gags and an endearing undercurrent of friendship declared.

This is even more the case with The Whole Shootin’ Match, which features no such tragic conclusion but rather builds up to a moment of clarity, or at least as close to one as this hillbilly Hope and Crosby can hope to approximate. Loyd (Perryman) and Frank (Davis) have evidently been pals a long while, having collaborated in a number of failed get-rich-quick schemes, everything from a flying squirrel farm to the chinchilla business. Things kick off as Loyd proposes another dazzling new enterprise: polyurethane. Hang onto your hats.

The distinctions between Perryman and Davis’ characters are more pronounced here. Loyd is the persistent optimist and inventor. One of my favourite scenes conveys Loyd’s silent glee over his crafting of a spinning wand that makes bubbles. Frank is the philandering family man whose innate cheerfulness and obvious love of Loyd keep him within safe distance of depression and complete alcoholic collapse. As the story ambles on its way, with more bars, fights, dancing, drinking and working en route, Loyd and Frank are teased by success when Loyd’s new super-mop—he has a revelation in an automated car wash—gets picked up by a local manufacturer who gives them a whopping $1000 just for signing a contract. You can probably guess how things turn out. The final sequence finds them looking for Indian treasure in the hills outside Austin and coming to what feels like some sort of fork in the road, even if neither of them is entirely cognizant of the fact.

Perryman and Davis embody the dreams of those Americans who feel alienated by the larger society they inhabit yet never stop trying, in that deeply American way, to beat the system. Pennell connected with his characters so strongly that his own story came to resemble theirs even as he revealed an artistic vision never granted to them. Pennell nurtured a legend of failed potential all too aligned with his body of work, and he died, following years of drinking, professional and personal self-sabotage, and even intermittent homelessness, in July of 2002. He was just shy of 50. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around long enough to see what sort of success his good ol’ boys would achieve. His best work survives and will continue to do so. 

A thousand points of flickering light: David Thomson's Have You Seen...? is another colossal homage to that corrupting labyrinth of cinema

There is a threshold that divides the perfectly sound criticism of movies from another literary pursuit, foolishly ambitious, irredeemably obsessive, inevitably laced with something like memoir, a writing that makes pleas for its existence completely apart from the work, if not the whole labyrinthine medium, it addresses. I understand, you may or may not want to take on what’s delivered from the far side of that threshold, though I’ve always found that it’s precisely where things start to get genuinely interesting. There’ve been several writers who’ve blazed a trail through this thorny terrain, but I have a special admiration for the British-born David Thomson, whose one-man encyclopedia, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, remains a mind-boggling text, among the most compulsively perused books I own, full of aphoristic flights, brilliant observations, towering bullshit and enraging dismissals, not to mention ordinary old movie lust. (Enter Nicole Kidman.)

Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films (Knopf, $45) is a sort of companion to The Biographical Dictionary, another sprawling tome of filmic considerations that scale the medium’s century-plus trajectory—not Thomson’s thousand best, mind you, but perhaps his thousand most worth discussing? Honestly, my impression is that he’s not completely sure what these selections collectively constitute, but the number itself seems important: “going for a thousand is a gesture toward history… like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita.” It should be stressed that Have You Seen…? is not a compendium of previous published reviews, or even, most impressively, previously aired opinions, but a wholly realized project all its own. Every title here, from Paris, Texas (“I’m not sure that many films are as moving and as incoherent”) to Persona (“We are in performance: it is a religious condition”), from 2001 (“a lavish travesty”) to Stalker (“I am in awe of the power—yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker”), and every artist, from Mickey Rourke (“a poet, if someone could lay down the length of his lines”) to Ingmar Bergman (“the saint of lives that may think they are settled”), from Catherine Denueve (“she seemed dipped in liquid cocaine”) to James Spader (“a cul-de-sac of oddity”), is newly surveyed.

Thomson once wrote that there’s no effect more special than an actor changing his or her mind, and for those familiar with Thomson’s arguments, there’s pleasure to found in seeing how the writer, too, changes his mind. As evident in the irreverent compliment to Stalker above, it appears Thomson’s finally come around in a big way to Andrei Tarkovsky, who has no less than four films in the thousand, and he’s learned to love the morbid lyricism that underlies the films of Val Lewton, once derided for his “B-movie philosophy.” Thomson still has an annoying habit of pooh-poohing Akira Kurosawa however, largely because he wasn’t Kenji Mizoguchi—sometimes you wonder how much Japanese cinema Thomson’s actually seen. There are other filmmakers whose work Thomson seems to have appraised only recently and is still catching up with—how else to explain the inclusion of both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises but nothing else from David Cronenberg? At one point Thomson congratulates Poltergeist for giving us “TV as the threshold for the other world” but, bafflingly, makes no mention of Videodrome.

Weirder still, we get Thomson’s praise for To Die For and Happy Together, the former the book’s sole selection from Gus Van Sant, the latter it’s only Wong Kar-Wai. At least Van Sant and Wong get mentions—there isn’t a single film from Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Shohei Imamura or Jim Jarmusch entered in this book that nevertheless makes room for Mary Reilly, the original Thomas Crown Affair and Yentl. And it kind of disgusts me that we get an entry on the recent, widely celebrated rediscovery of Army of Shadows, a product of the French cinematic establishment, while no whisper of the equally celebrated rediscovery of Killer of Sheep, a product of South Central Los Angeles that hauntingly reveals the Third World alive and well in prosperous America.

Flamboyant subjectivity, incompleteness and even contrarianism is, of course, part of the point of Have You Seen…?, which is always, stridently, personal in approach, a look at movies, and perhaps even more so the experience of movies, through the prism of a single articulate obsessive. Thomson knows that opinion and analysis both need to be fluid and flexed to stay alive. He’s taken it upon himself, sometimes, mind you, to absurd and unpersuasive degrees (see his review of My Darling Clementine), to hold every classic up to the highest standard, deliberately sniffing out flaws in masterpieces, while he pounds his fists on a few occasions to make cases for the overlooked and under-loved. And when Thomson returns to work he’s examined previously and thoroughly, he often delivers his finest prose of all, breathtaking, penetrating the very heart of something, wrestling with reflections on the real life outside the frame, making you want to rush out and re-see the film in question. On The Mother and the Whore: “It is long because people will talk themselves into silence over sex and love, and the uncertain hope that they can be kept separate… they catch youth at that tyrannical moment when it can believe it will never have to yield.”

Something that really irks some readers—or, at least, many fellow critics—is Thomson’s perpetual mistrust of cinema as a genuine art. He does indeed have a niggling knee-jerk toward high and low artistic designations that can corrupt otherwise sound arguments, but I actually consider this aspect of the work on the whole enjoyable, intriguing and revealing, especially when you catch onto the fact that it’s the cinema’s very slipperiness that so obviously seduces Thomson, who uses Have You Seen…? to constantly weave film history, business and biography into his one-page reviews, a way of accounting for exactly that multi-tired phenomenon that gave its title to Thomson’s history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. “I came to a fork in the path and followed movies rather than Henry James,” he confesses near the book’s end—though, I suppose, such a reference book has no end—and we know exactly what he’s getting at, a choice to simply adore and revere literature, music and painting while aiming his critical faculties at a force more unruly, more corrupted, more ghostly, more exploited, more mysterious, more collaborative, seemingly infinite and in all it accumulates from the world and spits back into it. If that last part sounds a little too abstract and sweeping, well, spend a few hours with Have You Seen…? and you might just get swept up in the whirlwind yourself, a state of being in which the immensity of movies surrounds you and becomes at once slight, fractured, and dangerously endless in meaning.

Race, Class and American lyricism: Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding on DVD

When Charles Burnett’s extraordinary feature debut Killer of Sheep (1977) received its first-ever proper theatrical release last spring, I, like so many others, felt instantly as though I’d found my new favourite movie. Burnett’s idiosyncratic method of capturing incident, play and struggle in the Watts district of Los Angeles, his marvelous eye for off-kilter composition, his empathy for diverse characters, his irreverent drawing out of the comedic aspects of even the most dire scenarios, his light touch with social commentary and wonderfully fluid use of songs by the likes of Paul Robeson and Dinah Washington –one of the main reasons the film was never released was its plague of music clearance issues– his necessary utilization of ultra-low budget production values as an aesthetic and even moral choice: all of these things made Killer of Sheep feel like a revelation, a movie as artful and arresting in its depiction of the marginalized classes as Los Olvidados (50).

Yet accompanying all the praise given to Killer of Sheep was this constant, melancholic undercurrent, a lament for a great, raw talent largely wasted all these years. Numerous senior critics implied that in the 30 years since the film’s completion Burnett had never matched the vitality of his debut, or, To Sleep With Anger (90) excepted, even came close. After having gone through all of Burnett’s work featured on Milestone’s new Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection, I beg to differ. The two-disc set contains four shorts by Burnett –half of which are brilliant, while the other half merely warm, smart, inventive and funny– and Burnett’s feature My Brother’s Wedding (83), which, particularly in its new director’s cut, is an absolutely worthy follow-up to the preceding masterwork.

There are doubtlessly ardent fans who might resent the simple fact that My Brother’s Wedding is a more emphatically narrative film than Killer of Sheep. But just because it has a clear story is no reason to see My Brother’s Wedding as any sort of compromise toward commercialism, nor does that story prevent Burnett from inviting his characteristic digressions into comic mishaps, amusing ephemra, or pure character development.

The film follows 30-year-old Angelino Pierce Mundy, played with unmannered sincerity by Everett Silas, who, sadly, seems to have never made another film. While doing little aside from working listlessly in his mother’s dry cleaners or helping to care for some elderly relatives, Pierce is simultaneously confronted with two inevitabilities that illustrate the socio-economic polarities that define his attitude. On the one hand, his elder brother, a successful doctor, is marrying a lawyer from a middle-class black family, much to the delight of Pierce’s working class parents and the seething hostility of Pierce. One the other, Pierce’s old pal Soldier returns home from a stint in prison, looking for good times and trouble. Both of these scenarios reach a crisis point that demand Pierce’s attention and force him to make allegiances, though in the end his inability to satisfy either party is what brings the story to its enigmatic conclusion, an image that solidifies Pierce as the unwitting representative of a community’s conflicted soul, a community at once desirous of positive change and doomed by its tendency to prey upon itself.

Burnett imbues the film with a lively, mischievous spirit, with scenes of Pierce and Soldier play-fighting in a stranger’s yard, singing doo-wop in a stairwell or using the dry cleaners as an impromptu love nest, scenes of customers who can’t claim their clothes because they can’t remember their aliases. He conveys the complexities of classism with much wit, such as in the scene in which Pierce’s nouveau riche in-laws-to-be show off their Mexican servant, taking pride in their acquisition of the accoutrements of the class that once oppressed them. And he delivers moments of wondrous lyricism, such as the one in which Pierce’s Bible reading dissolves dreamily into an ill-fated drive along a tree-lined avenue. A rough cut of My Brother’s Wedding was screened at festivals in Toronto and New York but prompted only lukewarm reviews and, in what was becoming a despairing tradition, failed to receive distribution. The rough cut ran at 118 minutes. Burnett’s new director’s cut clocks in at 81 minutes. You can’t say the man doesn’t appreciate concision.

Burnett’s first short ‘Several Friends’ (1969) is very much a stand-alone work as well as a sort of gearing up for Killer of Sheep, riffing engagingly on running themes of animal slaughter, fleeing pleasures, and broken machinery that never seems to get fixed. A child watches her father collapse in an alley. A parking lot fight is overseen by people both in cars and –in a typically goofy visual non-sequiter– on horseback. Hens are slaughtered and then plucked using some medieval machine. Two guys work on a car while a friend visits to show off his white girlfriend, a pivotal strategy in his attempts at upward mobility. The whole possesses an easy, compelling rhythm.

‘The Horse’ (1973) features eloquently composed rural landscapes in its tale of several men waiting in the mid-day heat for someone to come and facilitate the killing of a horse. One white guy sits on a shady porch, working on the crease in his pants as another lays flat and flicks a knife into the ceiling so that it dangles like some tiny sword of Damocles over his head. All the while a black boy sits mourning in the sun-beaten dust with the condemned horse. It’s a strange, curious, sad and beautiful little film.

The final highlight of this package I want to mention here is Burnett’s commentary track for Killer of Sheep. I was able to interview Burnett for Vue last July and was happy to find that same warm, humble and unassumingly insightful character speaking of his filmmaking experiences here. Most memorable for me among his comments was his feeling that people he knew back in the 70s were always telling him he needed to speak for the black community. Burnett found this idea absurd. Instead, he tried to simply show people in his community in enough situations that felt were truthful to his and their experience, and in doing so, let the black community speak for themselves.

Charles Burnett on Killer of Sheep

One of the most simultaneously acclaimed and unseen works in American movies, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is finally making its proper theatrical debut 30 years after its completion. Its scarcity was partially due to licensing difficulties resulting from the film’s expressive use of music from the likes of Paul Robeson, Rachmaninoff and Dinah Washington, whose rendition of ‘This Bitter Earth’ supplies the emotional clincher for two of the film’s most memorable, stark and heartbreaking scenes.

Not that Burnett needed any assistance with regards to the film’s lyricism. Set within the crumbling buildings, dusty rail yards and rundown homes of Watts, Los Angeles, Burnett’s images of children roof jumping, wearing masks or playing with rocks, families assembling on front stoops, and its protagonist, Stan, accumulating work hours in an abattoir are imbued with an aching visual poetry –not to mention a terrifically funky sense of humour. These two elements frequently conspire to provide the film with its most pointed moments, such as the scene where Stan explains why he doesn’t consider himself poor. “I give things to the Salvation Army sometimes,” he says.

Stan’s occupation also forms a poetic, if dire, link with his private disorders: Stan’s an insomniac, thus he not only kills sheep but counts them, too. His wife craves his affection desperately, but he’s a million miles away. When not working, Stan throws himself into less emotionally demanding projects, such as acquiring a motor for a friend’s jalopy, a mission doomed to comic failure. The closest thing to conventional heroism on display here is simply Stan and his wife’s ability to endure an existence that promises precious few opportunities at advancement with their humanity in tact.

Social context aside, the singular, striking images of Killer of Sheep seem informed by the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. And these images have gone on to deeply influence other films, most notably David Gordon Green’s George Washington. Burnett himself seems perpetually surprised by his film’s impact however, claiming that he never intended it to be seen outside of activist or social science screenings. His family moved to Watts when Burnett was just entering kindergarten, and he felt that Killer of Sheep was basically just a reflection on where he was from. He spoke to with me from his current home in a different section of Los Angeles.

JB: I heard you first studied electronics.

Charles Burnett: Yeah, I was thinking about becoming an engineer. But I started looking at other people who were going into it, listening to their comments and jokes, what they expected out of life. It just didn’t seem interesting to me. Their jokes weren’t funny. They were looking forward to job security, buying a Winnebago, all that junk. That didn’t sound too inviting.

JB: Was being a filmmaker too far out a notion for you then?

CB: It was more a matter of my not being aware of it. When I was a kid I always wanted to do something with a camera, but had no clear ideas. Then I went into electronics, got disenchanted with that. Then I started going to movies a lot, and wondering how you make these things. And I discovered UCLA’s program, which was dirt-cheap at the time.

JB: How was your experience at UCLA?

CB: It was a chance for discovery. I remember taking this documentary class with Basil Wright that was very instrumental in my deciding which way to go.

JB: In the sense that you saw the documentary elements within fiction films?

CB: It was more that when people would talk about fiction films, you never heard them talk about the importance of treating the subject in a human way. Being honest and respectful, that kinda stuff. It made me look at films differently.

JB: Did you always intend to make a film about race, class and community?

CB: Well, I was certainly aware of race, being from Mississippi. And L.A. was worse somehow, divided and Apartheid-like in many ways. In my neighbourhood two or three of us couldn’t walk down the street together without being harassed, being sent to jail for the least thing. They wouldn’t give you a chance. Lots of kids thought it was funny going to jail, a rite of passage. So I think that my social conscience just came from growing up in that environment.

JB: It’s interesting to consider Killer of Sheep in the context of its period, particularly how it contrasts the blaxploitation films popular then.

CB: Many of us were getting into film to create our own narratives, to counter what Hollywood offered. So when these blaxploitation films came, initially they were exciting simply because a black person was the centre of attention. The negative side became apparent later on. But my thing was trying to reflect a situation where the audience would be able to ask themselves how they might help these people. And I didn’t want to romanticize things with regard to the working class.

JB: Did the story come to you in an ordered way?

CB: It did actually. But I wanted it based in the day to day. There’s no single thread that moves it, just the things that happen as you continue trying to eke out a life.

JB: Music is unusually vital in Killer of Sheep. Did you have a precise idea how the music would interact with your images?

CB: Yeah. A lot of it is blues, music I grew up with. I associate it with that environment. And with blues you have to grow up to really understand it. I had the good fortune to speak with August Wilson many years before he died, and he was saying how these same songs somehow generated images for his plays. That’s how it worked for me.

JB: Looking back after 30 years, how has Killer of Sheep changed for you?

CB: Seeing it now just makes me think how the neighbourhood’s changed. It was a much better life back then, before crack hit. People could still own their homes. There was a sense of community. Parents these days don’t want their kids going out for fear they might get shot. Back then kids could go anywhere. People used to say that if you wanted to better yourself just get a high school diploma. Now they’ll just tell you to get up and get away from here.

JB: Are the things that were important to you when you made Killer of Sheep still important to you now?

CB: I think the core is still there, the whole idea of why I got into film in the first place. The problem’s just that you can’t do the film you want to. With money comes however many compromises, and you need to constantly put things in terms that money people understand.

JB: Any chance this new wave of acclaim for Killer of Sheep might help you do what you want?

CB: Nah. People want films to make money. Folks’ll just look at me as an art film person. And art can be a dirty word in this business.