My Responsibility: Charles Burnett on “The Annihilation of Fish”

A quarter of a century later, a romantic masterpiece resurfaces.
Carlos Valladares

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).

The cinematic event of the year so far is the rerelease of Charles Burnett’s long-unavailable romantic masterpiece, The Annihilation of Fish (1999). It has weathered Todd McCarthy’s snide, vicious Variety review that sealed its obscurity until now. McCarthy falsely claimed it was “a drear moment in the careers of all concerned” and even had the temerity to suggest that “theatrical release other than via self-distribution is out of the question.” Whatever reputation it’s had up until this point has been due to the burning-candle cinephiles on Letterboxd and online film boards who have claimed it an unjustly forgotten work. We now know how right the burners were: Fish is a sophisticated, beautifully acted, and innovative romantic comedy for grown-ups. Unfortunately, because of that disastrous McCarthy review, Fish did not get the wide distribution it so obviously merited until now. It’s too late for its stars, who have all died, but not for Burnett, a national treasure and an inspiration for scores of directors and cinephiles. It’s scandalous that belated releases have become a running theme in the career of one of the greatest US filmmakers. Killer of Sheep (1978) was released 30 years after it was made, To Sleep with Anger (1990) finally got a splashy restoration and revival run in 2019, and the world is still not widely hip to Nightjohn (1996). All in due time. Now it is the time for Fish.

The Annihilation of Fish lavishes Chaplinesque adoration—and Burnett’s distinct warmth—upon all its struggling, gloriously weird, and tender lovers trying to find peace with each other: a schizophrenic Jamaican immigrant named Obediah “Fish” Johnson (James Earl Jones), ex-housewife Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave) who thinks she’s having an affair with the long-dead opera composer Puccini, and the widowed landlady Muldroone (Margot Kidder) who gets homicidal whenever anyone writes her last name without an “e.” Fish and Poinsettia fall in love, of course—and, as the saying goes, so does the audience. Yet this is a film which invigorates what unimaginative minds will call “cliché.” What Burnett does with tropes, traditions, and close-ups for melodramatic effect here is astonishing: he and his brilliant ensemble go so deep with received ideas that the idea emerges rejuvenated, exposed as ancient wisdom. It’s my new favorite film about the biggest fear in a new relationship: the encroachment of reality. She sees what you are. You open yourself up to his eyes. Will you meet with repulsion, or will they pull you in?

I had the great privilege to speak with Burnett, following a whirlwind weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Burnett had flown in from Los Angeles to speak several times after showings of the first proper release of The Annihilation of Fish, rescued out of its 25-year distribution purgatory by Milestone Pictures and Kino Lorber. Since we grew up in the same part of Los Angeles, and since Los Angeles is such a huge presence in his work, we start our conversation talking about our beloved city.

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).


NOTEBOOK: My first question is just about Los Angeles. Watching Annihilation of Fish for the first time on Valentine’s Day, what struck me was the sense of enchantment with which you imbue Echo Park. You told the story of how you went scouting for locations in different areas and happened upon the house at 998 West Kensington Road that you used as the boarding house where most of Fish takes place. I was wondering what drew you specifically to Echo Park. And were you thinking of shooting Echo Park in contradistinction to how you’d shot Watts or South Central or the LA Freeways in The Final Insult [1997]? Your LA is this roving mosaic, parts of it harsh, parts of it magical, but always with lyrical dignity.

CHARLES BURNETT: When we first moved to LA, we lived in East LA. I remember going to Ramona Gardens, and the big Sears store was over there. I went to a school in Watts called Garman. And one of the first places we went to on a school field trip was the lake in the Echo Park area. We had this wood shop at the time, and we made these little boats, and we went sailing there. They had this boat race in Echo Park. I made a little boat. Don’t have it anymore. But it was always this sort of magical remembrance of a joyous place. There’s this very big building that has this nice curvature to it on the north of the lake. Aimee Semple McPherson built a church there in the 1920s. 

NOTEBOOK: The Angelus Temple! I pass it by every time I’m back home. Such a lovely, strange building in the middle of this now gentrified neighborhood.

BURNETT: Yeah, it’s a very popular place to live! So when we were looking for the house [where Mrs. Muldroone runs her boarding house], we looked everywhere—for a year!—to try to find a house that had its own history, charm, and unique look. And luckily we had Paul Heller, who produced this and was mainly responsible for making it happen. And when we passed by it one day, we said, “That’s it! That’s the house we need.” Echo Park is a very picturesque area. There’s this flat land where the lake is, and then the rest of the neighborhood is based on a hill. And there’s a community that’s very diverse in many ways. Just east of it is Olvera Street where mariachis perform. Right across from Union Station. You get tacos, you hear music from these guys with big guitars—it is a joyous place. There were a lot of things about the area that I really responded to.

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).

NOTEBOOK: You did Fish right on the heels of The Final Insult, and I found there were deep rhymes and resonances between the two. In both, you’re not only looking at an area of a major city that’s often overlooked, you’re also following two distinct sets of people: the homeless in The Final Insult, and here, very romantic people who our larger, rather abnormal society would deem to be mentally ill and therefore unsuitable to live within “normal” society. Are you conscious of how your films work in response to the last works you make?

BURNETT: Well, one of the interesting things, having grown up in LA—and I'm sure you’ve experienced this too—LA used to be relatively clean.

NOTEBOOK: Yes.

BURNETT: People who had jobs at a car wash or whatever, they could afford to live in an apartment because it wasn’t that expensive. It was like $10,000 for a two- or three-bedroom house in East LA. Same thing in Watts. And if you saw a homeless person or a hobo, it wasn’t that you ever thought of him as “homeless,” but instead that it was a choice they had made. You’d walk down to Union Station, and just north of that, near where the tracks would begin to run everywhere across the country, you would see hobos—sorry about using the word “hobo.” You would see these transients, let’s say, with their saxophone on the back, walking up the tracks. There was a notion that you could, in a certain sense, idealize them. They didn’t have families out there with them or kids out there. You wouldn’t see villages of homeless people. Now, this is everywhere. Having grown up there, you feel and you see this decay, and where this country is going.

When I wanted to do The Final Insult, I had this camera available to me, and I wanted to do something that had some meaning to it. I looked at homelessness in the sense of, in a year or two, that could be me. I had a friend of mine who was an accountant for a major firm. He had his own boat in Colorado, and moved to LA, and he was the lawyer for an editor that I knew. And so I got to know him. He ended up staying at my place, and next thing I knew, he was homeless. He had disappeared. I next found him on the street. I said, If this guy, this accountant who deals with money and who accomplished a lot, owned a boat, a house in Colorado… If this guy could be homeless, this could be any one of us. It just showed me that there was something seriously wrong with this country.

NOTEBOOK: That’s one thing that I felt really connected Fish with Final Insult. You’re in the groove of this film, a wonderful romantic comedy. At the same time, it resists a lot of the clichés one has come to expect of romantic comedies that have a very Hollywood kind of mentality in plot, construction, or technique. It’s precisely because, in Fish as in Final Insult, you have an acute political awareness of who your characters are, how they exist in real space, and how they communicate with each other. Tenderness, as Annihilation of Fish ultimately proves, is an extremely political act. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).

BURNETT: Here’s what I’ll say: Film is very costly. Even though this is an independent film with a very low budget, it is still a lot of money compared to what other people have or are making. So you find yourself making choices. I received this grant in the 1970s, and from that I was able to make The Horse [1973] and Killer of Sheep. And this friend of mine who I grew up with wanted to borrow some money from me. I had just gotten this grant to do Killer of Sheep. So I had to make a choice. Either share some of this money with him, or make the film. This guy needed some money so he could leave town, leave Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I couldn’t share it with him. And he ended up getting killed in a car accident. I said to myself, If I had loaned him the money, he would probably be alive today.

I’ve always felt that if you’re going to do film, it has to have some effective, progressive element for the community. It’s because I grew up in the era of the Civil Rights movement, where the thing was: It is your responsibility to make things right. You have a responsibility to be in the movement. You had to think in those terms. That’s always shaped me, my responsibility.

When we got into [UCLA] film school, we knew that these were the kind of films we had to make. We had to be progressive. Third World cinema was very important to us in that respect. 

NOTEBOOK: Like The Hour of the Furnaces [1968] by Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino? Or Glauber Rocha’s work?

BURNETT: Exactly. All of those films. A lot of Italian neorealism. Ousmane Sembène, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who I was lucky to have met in San Sebastian. A great inspiration. All these filmmakers, you see their films and you idolize them and say, This is really what filmmaking is about. You had all these serious filmmakers out there, who had been in the struggle to make films for the longest time, making films, instructing us indirectly, making examples of films that talked about the political situation, informed us, meant something to the community that was being drowned out by Hollywood films. 

Having taken Basil Wright’s documentary course, I was really helped in many ways. And Basil said to us, “This is how you treat your subject: with respect. Don't worry about being at UCLA and people making films about nudity and self-wellness. Make films about your community.” We were at the time fighting against the narratives that Hollywood was producing about people of color, particularly The Birth of a Nation [1915]. We responded negatively to Hollywood, because they distorted who we were as people. We wanted to correct that. 

We learned that film has to be more than just an indulgence, a substitution for a good time. That’s destruction, and it was never about being destructive. It’s about making a change in people’s lives. One of the good things about making films, for me, are the moments when people come up and validate it by saying, “Your film changed my life.” At that point, you realize that it’s never about money, but about that response. To gear yourself up. To make a difference. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).

NOTEBOOK: Charles, you’re the person I immediately think of when I think of someone who experiments successfully in so many different formats and different ways of how you can narrativize something: Disney Channel melodramas, neorealist LA films, “magical realist” LA films, jazz shorts for French TV, talking-head documentaries about Nat Turner, cop noirs, and now this romantic comedy. Your subtle knack for the surreal tracking across so many seemingly disparate films. None of your films resembles the other, and it’s beautiful. How much of this is you wanting to work deliberately in different genres, film formats, and modes? And how much of it is out of necessity, a response to the historical conditions of being a Black US filmmaker and dealing with questions of money, power, racism, ageism, sexism, and so on?

BURNETT: This is the tragedy of a lot of filmmakers who want to make a film that reflects the wide range of narratives that take place every day in this country, but don’t get a chance because it’s all about Hollywood, about making money, and so forth. When we got into film school, it wasn’t about making money. It was about being factual and about trying to make a difference and make people progressive, in a way.

To answer your question: As a filmmaker, you have to grow. And you grow by being challenged. The other thing we learned from Third World Cinema is that film is political, you know. So we had to include this in our films. If you lived in the Black community, you saw the disparity, you saw that disadvantage, you saw how the inequality affects kids in the future. When you have kids, you even feel more responsible. You had to be in the forefront of change, and therefore your existence depends on your ideas and concepts. When I finished Killer of Sheep, it got a favorable independent response. But when you get to your second film, people just want you to keep making that kind of film. And you need to say, No. I need to step out and grow. I need to create a larger tapestry. A larger world. We need more people to make all kinds of films. Relatively good films. Politically effective films.

Where I grew up, Los Angeles, it’s so diverse. There’s a huge Hispanic community. And neighbors help one another in LA. My mother’s neighbor across the street was from this Latin American country, and they always came over to make sure she was all right. Teenagers had other issues, you know, with the gangs and so forth, but even this could be resolved: better schools, everything that these kids need and don’t get. There are concrete reasons for these things. People don't realize, for instance, that Watts is a very polluted area. There was industry there before World War II. And after the war, they left everything. Now, the ground is full of pollutants, and it’s going to take billions of dollars to clean that stuff. So the kids are growing up with pollution in their system. They want to address it, but it’s getting to be so expensive now. And they’re affected by the disinterest of gas companies, of chemical factories. 

On 120th Street, in Compton, there’s this park, it’s really a nice park, and it helps the community—and there’s a big lake in it. I found out that the lake is so full of pollution, and they have to warn people not to fish in this lake. But guess who needs to fish there? Immigrants, trying to get catfish. They have to fish. And there’s a warning sign, only as big as a postage stamp, that says don’t fish. People don’t pay attention to it. There was a child daycare center on the park property, and they had to close it because it was affecting the lives of these little kids. They were totally unaware that they needed to clean up this area. And Carlos, it’s right across from a big school like Centennial, a very popular high school. People need to be aware of all of this. Films can help.

NOTEBOOK: They’re not idle images. Making a film like When It Rains [1995] or Annihilation of Fish is an intervention in how we view the world. Nightjohn is brilliant on all levels: a children’s movie, made for Disney, not only about slavery, but about illiteracy, and that language is our salvation, our way out of our condition. Both Nightjohn and Selma, Lord, Selma [1999] were played all the time at my school, Angeles Mesa Elementary, when I was growing up on Crenshaw and Slauson. From that age, your films gave me, and countless others, a really different sense of the world. They help you begin to understand it, which is the first step. And then the second step is to act, make a shift, shift the world. Not to be a spectator, but to act, to make an active intervention into reality.

BURNETT: When I went to junior high school in South Central, I didn’t know what school was about. I just thought they were just housing us there to babysit us while our mothers and fathers were working. It wasn’t until I got into college that I started to read more, to discover things. They didn't have Black history when I was coming up. That came later. Later generations like yours benefited from that. I would have been really affected positively had I had that opportunity to learn about my past. And now, what is so dangerous is that they are deliberately trying to eradicate and erase our history in schools. Who we are as people. And we need that. That’s why we had Black history month. I understood more, learning about W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, all these folks. We need to look at education and what it’s supposed to do for us and to us, you know. For the filmmakers I came up with together, that was our purpose.

NOTEBOOK: How does it feel seeing this film emerge after 25 years of it being ignored—because of the industry, the review in Variety, and so on? We’re properly discovering this film for the first time.

BURNETT: Very mixed emotions. James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder all played in it, as well as Linden Chiles. And they were all wonderful actors, great people to work with. We were very lucky to have them. But they have all passed. And every time I see the film, I see that they could have been recognized as great talent. They didn't get the opportunity. That review came out, which was very harmful in many ways. I remember Lynn Redgrave having problems [during the shoot], but she came to the set as a real trooper and performed gracefully. Same thing with James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder. You wish they, as well as the audience, had benefited from this experience.

When you make a film and cast people that hadn’t had exposure for a while, you find out how great they are. Take To Sleep with Anger. I used a lot of older Black actors who had passed their prime, whom I didn’t know existed, but who were very talented. And then when they came in and read for the parts, they just blew you away. And I would ask the dumbest questions. I’d ask, “How come I haven’t seen you in anything before? Where have you been?” Their answer was: “They don’t hire us.” And so it becomes your job as a director to fight for these people to get the exposure. And really, it’s not that they are suffering from lack of exposure. It’s the audience who is missing out on what human beings are like and what we are capable of doing.

On Annihilation of Fish, Paul Heller said, “I want this film to look like Los Angeles. I want the crew to be diverse.” I didn’t have to sell him on the idea at all. He was ahead of the game. That’s what filmmaking should be about. Working with wonderful people who have hearts and want to do the right thing. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999).

NOTEBOOK: Are you working on anything right now that speaks to the Los Angeles of today? Especially given how so much has changed since Annihilation of Fish in the city, as we talked of earlier.

BURNETT: You always try to find ideas that are important. You try to think about the community. I grew up liking these people, having a relationship with them. So I’m old enough to represent them. That was the real reason I did Killer of Sheep: to tell their story without me imposing my values and things. I went to UCLA and discovered that my whole attitude differed from the kids I grew up with. And so I had to respect that, and hear their perspective. When I did the film Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation [2007], I was an American making a film about African independence. And I had to put myself in their position. I had to say, “This is not a Charles Burnett film. This is an African film told by Africans.”

The interesting good thing is there’s a lot of great material out there that hasn’t been mined. So it gives you the good opportunity to bring it to the attention of the right producer and for them to say, “I want to finance your film.” There are so many unsung heroes that we need to bring forward and talk about. When I was coming up, I would say: If I knew about certain people, certain figures, I would have been a different, better, stronger person. Kids growing up in my neighborhood needed that awareness that there were people out long before they were in the struggle, achieving things. And it’s your job, as a director, to look at these people and bring them forward. You know, our heroes are not such-and-such making $30 million, but people who were engaged in the community, uplifting them. Like Hattie McDaniel said, “I want to be a credit to my race.” People like Cesar Chavez, who have brought great light to communities, need to be put on the pedestal.

The author is grateful to Juan Medina and Aurelia Dochnal for helping to arrange this interview.

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Charles BurnettPino SolanasOctavio GetinoGlauber RochaOusmane SembèneNelson Pereira dos SantosBasil WrightInterviews
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