Charles Burnett: 'There's racism here and everyone knows it'

Charles Burnett's films are considered classics. So why isn't he famous, asks Skye Sherwin

In 1967, hanging out in Watts, South Central LA, a young black film student called Charles Burnett had an experience that would change his way of thinking forever. The topic of conversation in the barber shop that day was the great black actor and activist Paul Robeson. Surely Robeson was a hero, he asked them. But, says Burnett incredulously, "they disrespected him because Robeson talked ill about America and its problems."

It was a moment of self-realisation that led Burnett to reject the political films he'd been making. "I was always being asked, 'You being black, what do the black community want?' But how can I say what the black community is, when I don't even think the same way?"

Born in 1944, Burnett had grown up in South Central among kids who didn't think they'd make it past 21. To avoid the draft he enrolled in college, going on to study film at UCLA.

The Watts encounter drove him to tell a new kind of black narrative on screen: "I wanted to do a story that reflected the black community, without imposing my particular values on it."

For the past three decades, Burnett has tirelessly followed his ideal, shattering repressive typecasting moulds and dealing with issues central to a black experience. His first film, Killer of Sheep (1977), was declared a national treasure by the American Library of Congress, and his 1990 masterpiece To Sleep With Anger (re-released this week) won the Special Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

But few have ever heard of him. Killer of Sheep, the story of a slaughterhouse worker struggling to maintain his dignity, is rarely shown outside US film schools, and it's not available in the UK at all.And in spite of the film's critical success, it took 13 years and a collaboration with a red-hot star for Burnett's work to illuminate screens again with To Sleep With Anger. Danny Glover stars as a ghost from a family's past, an old friend whose smile conceals diabolic trickery. He says of his attraction to the project: "You don't see this. African-American families in stories are often defined by what happens outside of them, by their relationship to the racial tensions they live in. What about the tensions within their own family ... and how those things are exacerbated by their belief systems?"

Even with Glover on board, it was a struggle to get the film out there. "There was less than $500,000 for marketing the thing," Burnett points out: not enough to make an impact on an audience as vast as America. "It was ridiculous – it only opened in 18 theatres."

Burnett's reputation as a troublemaker didn't help matters. "I've been told I don't cooperate, meaning I'm not a collaborator. If you tell the truth and say there's racism in this industry, the irony is everyone knows it."

Halle Berry's break-through win at the Oscars this year is unlikely to alter those views. As Glover points out, the gains made by Berry and Denzel Washington have only served to highlight a cultural stalemate.

"When Sidney Poitier received his Oscar in 1963 it was at the height of the Civil Rights movement. You can question the role Sidney played, but the Oscar probably meant something. Now we see the world based upon whether the Oscars change something. They don't mean anything!"

The story of African-American cinema may still be something of a secret history, but Burnett remains undeterred. He recently completed Warming by the Devil's Fire, a blues project with Martin Scorsese.

"This drive to make everything white just drives you more towards wanting to make black stories," he explains. "They're American stories and it's part of American history."

'To Sleep With Anger' is re-released on Friday