search

To Sleep with Anger

To Sleep with Anger

The trailblazing African American director Charles Burnett’s third feature, To Sleep with Anger (1990), was his biggest production to date, albeit still made on a modest budget of $1.4 million, a significant portion of which was raised through the attachment of its star and executive producer, Danny Glover. At that point, on the heels of the first two Lethal Weapon films, Glover was a genuine Hollywood attraction, but To Sleep with Anger stands in stark contrast to the explosive antics of Riggs and Murtaugh. It is a quiet, nuanced, and utterly beguiling drama of family and folklore, featuring Glover as Harry Mention, an enigmatic drifter who one day arrives at the home of a middle-class black family in South Central Los Angeles. To Sleep with Anger’s startling flirtation with magic realism in an identifiably middle-class setting signaled a fresh departure for a filmmaker hitherto associated with brusquely naturalistic—if also gorgeously poetic—portraits of working-class African American families. Burnett had first come to attention with his 1977 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, a stark, black-and-white drama set in LA’s impoverished Watts neighborhood, in which the eponymous character (played with agonizing vulnerability by Henry G. Sanders) is a soul-deadened abattoir employee, drained of his joie de vivreby his social and economic surroundings. These surroundings were intimately familiar to Burnett, who as a small child in 1947 moved north with his family from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Watts, where he grew up.

This perfection was noted by a number of critics at the time, including the Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr, who branded To Sleep with Anger “the first great film to come our way in quite a while.” And yet the film’s release was botched by [opening] it on a mere handful of screens and marketed it as an art-house curiosity rather than as a film that would have much wider appeal, particularly for black audiences. Consequently, it endured a fate similar to that of other unorthodox yet hardly impenetrable works by independent black filmmakers of the period, such as Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989), and Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989): high critical praise, box-office oblivion, and, for decades, a dismayingly low profile.

— Ashley Clark, Criterion

To Sleep with Anger

Wed February 1, 2006, 7:00 only, Muenzinger Auditorium

USA, 1990, in English, Color, 101 min, Rated PG

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

C.U. Film Program

(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Looking for a gift for a friend?
Buy a Frequent Patron Punch Card for $60 at any IFS show. With the punch card you can see ten films (a value of $90).

We Want Your Feedback

Cox & Kjølseth
: Filmmaker Alex Cox & Pablo Kjølseth discuss film topics from their own unique perspectives.

Z-briefs
: Pablo and Ana share Zoom-based briefs on what's currently playing at IFS

Search IFS schedules

Index of visiting artists

Mon Apr 1, 2024

Hot Shots! Part Deux

At Muenzinger Auditorium

Sat Apr 20, 2024

Super Mario Bros.

At Muenzinger Auditorium

more on 35mm...