Still Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep

Within their temperature-controlled vaults, film archives guarantee a stabilized existence for celluloid-based moving image materials, protecting and imagining a potentiality for their future movement through film projectors for generations of audiences.

Photo courtesy Jennifer Rhee / UCLA Film & Television Archive

As a film programmer and curator working for the largest university-based archive in the world, I never forget my privilege of access to UCLA Film & Television Archive's embarrassment of riches: over 220,000 film and television titles, nearly half of which I can access for screenings at our primary venue, the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum.

As a matter of course, our catalog is the first I consult before I widen my search to studio holdings, other university archives, and the vast and sometimes mysterious network of private collectors. I kick myself when I discover that a print for which I’ve been searching is housed unassumingly within our vaults. Notably, for an upcoming 10-film celebration on the occasion of a forthcoming book by Victoria Riskin about her parents, actress Fay Wray (you know her from the original King Kong (1933) and screenwriter and frequent Frank Capra collaborator Robert Riskin, I am relieved to find that two of the titles are right under my nose: Capra’s Riskin-penned Meet John Doe (1941) and the Wray-starring The Most Dangerous Game (1932), both which came to us as part of a large Warner Brothers acquisition in 1976.

Obviously, upon acquisition and integration into an archive, the stabilization of these celebrated materials does not inevitably lead to their stagnation. Because most of these prints do still move, and how: the aforementioned 35mm print of Meet John Doe has been loaned to over two-dozen film festivals and cinematheques around the world in the past 15 years.* An even more well-known and beloved title like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which the Archive preserved in the early 1980s, has been loaned out for screenings internationally an estimated 200 times, making this popular Western one of the most mobilized 35mm prints of our collection.

These are just a few examples of the massive list of canonically-affirmed, feature-length studio films easiest to identify within any film collection, making these the most straight-forward materials to program for film screenings. These canonized works, made classic by their established name recognition, their studio clout, and the legacy of their makers, have naturally secured a guaranteed place on the shelves of moving image archives. These are the known quantities of traditional film history. Space is similarly afforded to heavily scratched or color-faded celluloid prints, or film fragments, audio tracks, and outtakes of material from those recognized, weighty, or famous works, lest these elements be necessary as points of reference for future preservation or restoration projects.

Photos courtesy Jennifer Rhee / UCLA Film & Television Archive

But what of those materials acquired and absorbed into collections whose future is undetermined? I consider here mostly fragments, unfinished works, unrealized projects hiding within our shelves--pieces of former ideas that come to us from filmmaker’s estates after they pass on, donations from filmmakers looking to keep their materials safe. These incomplete works assume physical position among these titans of popularity on the archive’s democratic shelves, and I wonder: Do these forgotten works, unfinished films that remain in their cans because of their immutable state of incompleteness, become jealous of their more frequently circulated shelfmates? Does their safe-keeping and stabilization lead to a stagnation of their legacy? Does it lead to a forgetting?

I ask my colleague, archivist Todd Wiener, how a film archive might prioritize space for material whose dynamism might just culminate on a shelf, an inquiry first and foremost concerned with the potential futures of unfinished and unrealized projects. Todd immediately points me toward the elements for It’s All True, Orson Welles’ unrealized 1941-42 film, for which UCLA holds over 700 unique elements, including unedited takes, original nitrate picture negatives, rushes, and magnetic audio tracks.

Paramount Pictures/Photofest

Some of this material was incorporated into the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles by filmmakers and producers Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn, and Myron Meisel, which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum argued “represents the first major effort after half a century of obfuscation to set the record straight” on Welles’s then-tarnished reputation. Is this experiment from 1993 to now be considered the definitive version of It’s All True? With the huge publicity push that accompanied the recent completion of The Other Side of the Wind (begun in 1970 and finished this year, yet another of Welles’ notoriously unfinished films), will any of these 700-plus elements be mobilized yet again?

For these illustrious filmmakers, the money is always miraculously available, and somehow bottomless. These objects will likely remain in motion. In other instances, it takes a massive team and intentional budget to even begin to execute the research needed to prioritize a collection and preservation effort of materials otherwise sidelined or marginalized.

Still Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep

In 2011, thanks to a Getty Foundation grant, the Archive began an oral history project to collect stories from the L.A. Rebellion group, a previously overlooked cohort of Black filmmakers active from the late 1960s until well into the 1980s, most of whom were at one time students, instructors and mentors from UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television. Ranging from renowned filmmakers Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, 1977) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991) to those who did not live long enough to see the multifaceted L.A. Rebellion project actualized, this history-gathering evolved into a full-blown restoration effort, the end products of which now live safely in our vaults as stabilized, yet circulating and borrowable materials. The Archive’s director, Jan-Christopher Horak, told his curatorial team at the time that they were “engaging essentially in an archeological project, where we have to consider every L.A. Rebellion film and tape we receive as possibly the only surviving material […]even if it is a bad video transfer of a beat-up work print on a three-quarter-inch tape that we have to literally bake to retrieve a signal.”

Like Stagecoach, our 35mm print of Killer of Sheep has now also moved around the world, albeit only some 50 or so times in the past 18 years. Killer of Sheep, however, was never quite at risk of obfuscation, having been preserved by UCLA a decade before the L.A. Rebellion project was underway--likely due to Burnett’s already-established name. It is these lesser-known works, at times orphaned, incomplete and unrealized, that require a stability to preserve their potential future.

Alile Sharon Larkin, Stormé Bright Sweet, Melvonna Ballenger, and Julie Dash

Melvonna Marie Ballenger, known to her familiars as Mel, was born during a St. Louis summer in 1954. After graduating from Howard University with a bachelor’s degree in Communications, Mel moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s to study film and television production at UCLA. We acquired the moving image materials from Mel’s estate after her untimely death due to breast cancer in 2003. Her legacy as an L.A. Rebellion cohort was briefly highlighted in the Archive’s two-month-long film exhibition in 2011, which included two of her works: her lyrical short film Rain, which Mel directed, produced and wrote in 1978 while an M.F.A. candidate at UCLA, and Dreadlocks and the Three Bears, which she shot in 1991 for filmmakers Alile Sharon Larkin and Armandilo Cousin. Rain was preserved to digital video from a ¾” video tape transfer; Dreadlocks was preserved to digital video.

Still from Melvonna Ballenger’s unfinished short film, Nappy-Headed Lady

However, what remains unseen, left unfinished and thus rendered immobile by the filmmaker’s untimely death, is her Nappy-Headed Lady, an incomplete project which began production in 1980 and, according to notes found with the donated materials, “will portray a young black woman growing up in the 1960s who rebels against her parents’ desire to have her hair straightened.” Intent on mixing documentary footage from the period to “connect the protagonist’s struggle with the nationwide Black movement,” the scripted scenes were shot on 16mm black and white film over several shoots in the Springs of 1980 and ‘81.  

The Archive retains 43 items related to this project, among them the following unconformed audio elements: “Hair Washing takes 1, 2, 3, 4,” “Health Spots (Immunization),” “Swimming pool scene,” “Inside kitchen,” “Shower scene,” “Telephone conversation,” “TV noise, commercials,” “wild sound,” and a ¼ inch audio cassette tape of sound effects. The only clue to how the film may have eventually looked exists as a work-in-progress edit on a DVD transfer of a ¾ inch tape, and is available to scholars via an appointment with our Archive Research and Study Center on the UCLA campus.

This incomplete version of the film, which was assembled in 1985 likely as a work sample created in the hopes of securing completion funds, hints at what the narrative portions of the story would have depicted: a teenager’s struggle to keep her “natural” against her parent’s wishes, her father’s heat-soaked beat as a mail delivery man in Los Angeles, a nurse’s argument with her supervisor about her “unprofessional” Afro.

This short story of Nappy-Headed Woman and Melvonna Ballenger is just one of so many hidden on the shelves of our archive, and within film archives everywhere. Because of the heft of the physical materials they support, film archives, no matter their financial resources, are in a constant war against three-dimensional space and its inherent limitations. It is for this reason that the space dedicated to collections, titles, and makers with a strong legacy might sometimes be given unintentional priority over other, lesser-known titles and filmmakers.** Still, on shelves next to these feature-length, studio-funded features sometimes sit the unseen Super 8 reels of celebrity home movies. In that same vault, cans with unconformed audio fragments might be inventoried near a since-forgotten student project from a now-renowned filmmaker.

Still from Melvonna Ballenger’s Nappy-Headed Lady

Drive down any street in Los Angeles, the city obsessively fueled by the moving image, and consider the contents of the houses around you: so many floors below beds and shelves in dark closets and rafters within garages stacked with shoe boxes and film canisters that house unfinished projects, never-before-screened student works, outtakes from dream projects never conformed into coherence, and features produced independently but, for any number of reasons, never distributed.

Their immobility as fragments on a shelf, as pieces in a box, leads to our forgetting of the magic they hold when in movement. This lesser-considered story of independent projects undertaken by so many without the means, the support, or the resources to see their projects through to completion represents part of an immobile film history, one stuck in time within the confines of celluloid. In activating fragments, or home movies, or outtakes, as our programs of orphaned works at the Wilder often do, we seek to avoid keeping them immobile forever. Programmers and curators everywhere can seek to do just the same.

Further Reading

LA Rebellion catalog, edited by Shannon Kelley, 2011  
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/LARebellionCatalog2.pdf

“Black women filmmakers” by Claudia Springer from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984, pp. 34-37
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC29folder/BlackWomenFilmkrs.html

*Not all 220,000-plus 16mm and 35mm materials in our Archive are circulating, or “loanable,” prints, which further emphasizes this crisis of space and should hint at the amount of material rendered immobile or officially non-circulating (and therefore, stagnant) due to several factors which, in the interest of adhering to the desired word count, I will refrain from elaborating further.

**This is not an institutional policy. For more information on UCLA’s donation policies, visit the Archive’s website. 

K.J. RELTH is a film programmer for UCLA Film & Television Archive, where she co-curates over 100 repertory, experimental, and contemporary international programs each year at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, with a mind toward exhibiting underscreened works by female-identifying filmmakers. She is an adjunct professor at CalArts School of Film/Video, where she teaches Film Today, a course highlighting the hyper-contemporary, worldwide cinema landscape. Relth holds a Master of Arts in Media Studies & Film from The New School.