Articulation, Embodiment, and the General Intellect in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep

Abstract: Charles Burnett's 1978 independent film Killer of Sheep is often read as a neorealist testament to inner-city hope and malaise in Watts. The highly imagistic film, a landmark piece of L.A. Rebellion cinema, has gained a foothold in Black Film Studies since its republication and release in 2007. This paper adds to current readings by analyzing the film alongside black American cultural debates between the Civil Rights Movement and the mid-1980s, as well as the same period's economic shift out of a Fordist mode of production. I do this by examining Burnett's cinematographic focus on moving limbs, which I insist allows us to question the apparent representability of black people on-screen. Instead of racialized representation based on the face or body, the characters on-screen demonstrate embodied modes of articulation that, given the film's focus on labor and social reproduction, resonate with recent discussions of Karl Marx's concept of general intellect. While general intellect describes a shared capacity for individual expression and creation, Killer of Sheep offers a way of reading racial articulation as an embodied, social process that occurs in particular historical and material conditions. Burnett's rendering of racialized articulation interrogates the distinctions that constitute a capitalist way of life organized around the wage worker, a way of life unraveling throughout the 1970s.