Charles Burnett’s California Before the Fall

The Annihilation of Fish, directed by Charles Burnett and released in 1999 and now newly restored by Kino Lorber, features an oddball, interracial romance played by the late actors James Earl Jones as Obadiah Fish and Lynn Redgrave as Poinsettia Cummings. These lonely senior citizens arrive at a Los Angeles bungalow where Fish, newly discharged from an asylum, wrestles with an imagined demon and Poinsettia mourns a fantasy romance with composer Giacomo Puccini. Their peculiarities fit Hollywood’s psychopathic ethos. It extends the racial tension that underscores all of Burnett’s films, especially Killer of Sheep, his highly lauded 1978 debut that has become an albatross for Burnett and other black filmmakers.

Forced to comply with stereotypical African-American misery, Burnett works best outside Hollywood formula. His personal integrity conflicts with liberal nostrums, resulting in Fish and Poinsettia’s bizarre repulsion-attraction rapport. Burnett indulges their antisocial quirks (conceived by Jamaican-Lebanese novelist Anthony C. Winkler), which make them needier than Tennessee Williams outcasts, although Burnett’s realist style constantly resists any poetic comparison. Redgrave had filmed Tennessee Williams’s Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (rated X in 1969), and her comic-tragic brio here matches Jones’s evocation of his own comic-tragic figure in The Great White Hope. Their love affair fights the specter of racism but is incompatible with Burnett’s occasional career effort to appease Hollywood liberalism. (Several years ago, Burnett expressed interest in making a biopic on Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s enigmatic white mother.)

As an American neorealist, drawn to depict historic spiritual struggle, Burnett just can’t lie, which makes The Annihilation of Fish an awkward presentation of the discordant elements in Hollywood race ideology. Jones, Redgrave, and an unrecognizable Margot Kidder as their dotty landlady bravely expose their vulnerability. (“Annihilation” is their exotic term for exorcising demons and trading in their illusions.) Melding Williams’s hidden racial empathy to Nathanael West’s grotesque sociology (as in The Day of the Locust), the result, though well intended, is what’s called film maudit, a cursed film.

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Upon its theatrical showing earlier this year, The Annihilation of Fish failed to resuscitate Burnett’s reputation. Luckily, Kino Lorber’s new DVD includes the Milestone Films version of his semidocumentary The Final Insult, from 1997, which better defines Burnett’s vision of California’s racial tableau.

His protagonist Box Brown (Ayuko Babu) first cites the O. J. Simpson trial as a then-timely measure of America’s (California’s) cultural breakdown. Babu is Burnett’s surrogate — a sage, funny observer and participant in urban society’s folly, as he was in Burnett’s When It Rains, his short movie from 1995. Operating his own camera, Burnett follows Brown/Babu as he encounters the homeless and veterans, drug addicts and Emotionally Disturbed People.

The Final Insult tames the albatross that Killer of Sheep became, expanding its black American misery to a wider perspective on the California miasma that Hollywood and corporate media now ignore. Burnett’s 1990s vision has been supplanted by the anarchy of California’s current politically contrived partisan anarchy.

As in Killer of Sheep, this semidoc’s devastating empathy avoids cynicism. Burnett lets L.A.’s victims speak for themselves. A homeless man discourses, “What we’re experiencing now is a lack in the growth of our manufacturing economy. We are growing as a service economy, but the majority of the people who have been displaced have been workers . . . guys building tires or pouring steel. When your job has been demolished, where do you go?”

These alert but down-and-out Californians are more believable than Fish and Poinsettia. Burnett’s palm-treed ironic paradise achieves something like Agnès Varda’s gentle blend of reality and artifice — sophistication. Images of parkways and river walks — of Brown/Babu driving through leafy neighborhoods, where his car that stalled on Sunset Boulevard stalls for a second time — are almost as plangent as Killer of Sheep.

The Final Insult contradicts the anti-American blame that legacy media have adopted and now foment. Though not as fully imagined as Killer of Sheep, it is consistent with its heartfelt pessimism — what is now replaced with socialist sanctimony that’s all the rage among self-justifying radicals. Without Fish’s conventional narrative, Burnett finds such images of California’s ongoing catastrophe as a homeless woman asleep on a bus stop bench that advertises Mary J. Blige’s Share My World album. Obvious, but the irony is real. Burnett provides sympathy for the social pathology that Hollywood no longer bothers to portray.