To Sleep With Anger

Charles Burnett - 1990
There aren't visual fireworks here, it is quite typical modern classicism. We have establishing, then moves in. As before, Burnett goes pretty close to these (necessary in colour? Don't start). He has some quietly distinctive moves, focussing on feet, and some delicate track-ups of bodies. The takes are long as before, but we here have a more neutral, stiller, as much as anything indoors, film than 'Killer Of Sheep' (the difference in class of the protagonists may partly explain this).
As far as composition, which is always simple, well done, there is surely something in the use of colour here; red dresses, or other items, coming at once, moves to blue, yellow lights. Also the autumn painting, and the most visually distinctive scene, the huge yellow sky over the burning railway. I wouldn't venture now to give symbolic keys, but this, at the least, adds vitality to the mis-en-scene.
And Burnett's editing. He likes to crosscut locations, or rather not between, but shows, with a simple cut, two actions in different places taking placce at the same time. Cinema as cutting time and space. He also frequently uses the elliptical edit, moving time on a little way abruptly. These don't really come across as jumps, but it's not far off.
We have a slowburn construction, not dead time but a build up of character across a series of average length scenes.
For all these words though, this is poetry, there is a curiousness (not just the opning sequence), an unwordliness. This is, essentially, a mythical tale, of the devil and the man (American South), brought up to modernity (this might have more in common with 'The Horse' in this respect than 'Killer Of Sheep'). It is about how ancient myths work in modernity. Ultimately, surely Burnett argues the old picture of a kind of masculinity must be rejected; in that sense, it is a propogandist film, or rather one with a clear message.
The tale structure gives this kind of beyond-realism sense, that Harry really could be the devil. But this doesn't divorce it from realism; it is just self-conscious realism, reality as packaged in a modern tale (but 'I don't want to hear any more tales', as the mother says...). The low-key (and completely brilliant; we're finding this across Burnett, just look at Glover's grey eyes, how the mother starts to wear that wig..) acting, the neutral locale, and the details make this realist, but with this poetry intermingling. A film to be read in various ways, but each can't be seperated.