Early life and education
Burnett was born on April 13, 1944, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to a nurse's aide and a military father. According to a DNA analysis, he is mainly descended from people from Sierra Leone.
In 1947, Charles's family moved to Watts, a largely black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Burnett was interested in expressing himself through art from a young age, but the economic pressure to maintain a stable job kept him from pursuing film or art in college.
Watts had a significant effect on Burnett's life and work. The community, which gained notoriety in 1965 when violent riots in the area caused the deaths of 34 people and injured more than 1,000, again made the news in 1992 when protestors turned to looting and arson following the acquittal of police officers tried for the beating of Rodney King. Burnett has said that the neighborhood had a strong Southern influence due to the large number of Southerners living in the area. Watts strongly influences his movies' subject matter, which often revolves around southern folklore mixed with modern themes. His film Killer of Sheep was set in Watts.
Burnett first enrolled at Los Angeles City College to study electronics in preparation for a career as an electrician. Dissatisfied, he took a writing class and decided that his earlier artistic ambitions needed to be explored and tested. He went on to earn a BA in writing and languages at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In an interview for Cahiers du Cinéma, Burnett speculated that "a serious speech impediment" may have led him to become a filmmaker: I always felt like an outside – an observer – who wasn't able to participate because I couldn't speak very well. So this inability to communicate must have led me...to find some other means to express myself...I really liked a lot of the kids I grew up with. I felt an obligation to write something about them, to explain what went wrong with them. I think that's the reason I started to make these movies. Burnett continued his education at the UCLA film school, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in theater arts and film. His experiences at UCLA had a profound influence on his work, and the students and faculty he worked with became his mentors and friends. Some fellow students include filmmaking greats like Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Jamaa Fanaka, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodberry. The students' involvement in each other's films is highlighted by Burnett's work as a cinematographer for Haile Gerima's 1979 movie Bush Mama, as a crew member for Julie Dash's 1982 Illusions, and as a writer and cameraman for Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts. His professors Elyseo Taylor, who created the department of Ethno-Communications, and Basil Wright, a British documentarian, also had a significant influence on his work.
The turbulent social events of 1967 and 1968 were vital in establishing the UCLA filmmaking movement known as the "Black Independent Movement”, in which Burnett was highly involved. The films of this group of African and African American filmmakers had strong relevance to the politics and culture of the 1960s, yet stayed true to the history of their people. Their characters shifted from the middle class to the working class to highlight the tension caused by class conflict within African American families. The independent writers and directors strayed away from the mainstream and won critical approval for remaining faithful to African American history. Another accomplishment of the Black Independent Movement and Burnett was the creation of the Third World Film Club. The club joined with other organizations in a successful campaign to break the American boycott banning all forms of cultural exchange with Cuba. Many critics have compared the films of the Black Independent Movement to Italian neorealist films of the 1940s, Third World Cinema films of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the 1990s Iranian New Wave. At the time the movement flourished, many countries in the Third World were involved in a struggle for revolution, inspiring them to create films expressing their own indigenous views of their history and culture. In addition to staying true to history, many Black Independent Movement films have been considered a response to Hollywood and Blaxploitation films that were popular at the time.
