I have a lower-than-average tolerance for art films, particularly foreign ones.  With very few exceptions, I cannot sit back and enjoy the black and white masterworks of directors like Godard, Bergman and Satyajit Ray.  I appreciate the formal beauty, the thematic depths, and the emotional clarities, but I just can’t get involved in the goings-on.  So I’m surprised that I fell so hard for “Killer of Sheep,” Charles Barnett’s 1978 movie about a family in Watts, Los Angeles.  Shot in black and white, structured like a collage, studded with too-long close-ups, and strung together with stilted dialogue, it’s basically an American-made foreign art film.  Many have compared it to Italian neo-realist cinema from the 1950’s, particularly “The Bicycle Thief.”

But this movie felt far more immediate to me.  It might be that it’s in English and that it was filmed in Los Angeles.  It reminded me of other American movies like “Mean Streets” that capture a small, personal world in great fidelity.  Everything is framed tightly, beautifully but not statically.  This gives the whole movie a low, constrained perspective that might be the perfect way to suggest the world of a child, and, perhaps, the world of a working class black family in Watts in the 1970’s.  There are hard-to-forget glimpses of everyday things: a girl playing with a doll, two men drinking tea, a husband and wife dancing together in their bedroom.  It’s not fantastically bleak (like “Precious”) and it’s not artsy either.  Even the movie’s eponymous final image, of the father leading sheep to slaughter in the abbatoir where he works, isn’t forced.  Each scene in this movie shows only and exactly what is there.