Frankie Teardrop, Killer of Sheep.

Part of the contemporary recuperation of Seventies' cinema has been the return of Blaxplotation, something largely inaugurated by Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in 1994 and entrenched by the enormous success of its inferior follow up Pulp Fiction. There’s a huge diversity of films corralled under the term blaxploitation from Marvin Van Peebles Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song to Across 110th Street, The Mack, to Foxy Brown, or The Spook who sat by the door and there is a general and rather reductive critical tendency to pit one film against the resurgent popularity of this generally "lowbrow" wave of exploitative, commercial and crass cinema ( as perceived by  critics) as the film that redeems black cinema of the seventies, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. My intention here is to dodge any false oppositions between say Across 110th Street or The Mack, and fête Burnett's work because he’s in thrall to the Neorealists, equally though I don't want to suggest that Killer of Sheep isn't a great film. It is.

Killer of Sheep’s subject as with Shrader’s Blue Collar is the black working class and the ravages inflicted upon it by the "restructuring" of the Seventies. Black workers were disproportionately affected by the decline in key Northern Industries in the Seventies they were in a sense at the thin end of two major waves of “technological unemployment”. The first was the great wave of layoffs that resulted from the mechanization of cotton picking in the south and the migration northward to arrive in cities like Detroit and New York as the auto and other industries begin to lose market share to foreign competitors and the adoption of post Fordist lean production methods and flattening of company hierarchies and “downsizing”. Unemployment and declining wages in other words, packed in to poor, older areas in cities with declining tax bases and infrastructure and public services often being hit by waves of drug imports flooding in from the Golden Triangle (heroin) or South America (cocaine) often as a means of funding guerilla and anti-communist groups in those areas. (see; the rather surprising Mel Gibson starring Air America.) Black workers were also less likely to be unionised or feel that their demands were adequately met by existing union structure, and hence had set up unions of their own. What is interesting about Killer of Sheep and Blue Collar is that they don't attempt any kind of transformation of the ghetto or the collapse of urban centres into the seventies into any kind of magical-realist playground, an attempt to reimagine and resymbolize the ghetto as a kind of post apocalyptic Wonderland. Killer of Sheep`s quiet, moving exploration of the daily struggle is a hard text to assimilate into any hipster celebration of black cool. Don't expect a Tarantino homage any time soon.

Technological unemployment is still a highly contentious notion, at least for orthodox economists, who believe that the productivity gains from increased use of technology will simply allow greater investment and spending elsewhere and fro new cycles of innovation and previously undreamed of industries to emerge.

Fear of the machine as a competitor, a destroyer of livelihoods is a folk-devil an irrational fear that non^orthodox economists are subject to. But as a fear, as an anxiety about the future, groundless or otherwise, it is ever present, though even the most starry-eyed of business-loving pundits are beginning to experience misgivings about the soothing blandishments of orthodox economics, two recent books (to name but two) Race Against the Machine and The Lights in the Tunnel are guides to how you personally can survive the coming jobcopolypse. You and perhaps your  family of course, there is to be no prospect of collective salvation.

That would be dangerously Utopian thinking.