Bless this Little Piece of Film Art (With your Attendance at its Screening this Weekend)

In its ongoing mission to quench New Yorkers’ thirst for film esoterica, Anthology Film Archives is screening 1984’s Bless Their Little Hearts this weekend (7:30 and 9:30 Friday thru Sunday, with 5:30 matinees on Saturday and Sunday) as part of their Charles Burnett retrospective. Burnett’s friend and fellow film student Billy Woodberry directs, while Burnett collects writing and cinematography credits. The collaboration is powerful, highlighting both filmmakers’ devotion to the stark conditions of Los Angeles’s black working classes in the 1980s.

For filmgoers in a vertical city, whose skyscrapers represent an imagined upward mobility, the flatness of Woodbery’s L.A. is suffocating. The landscape Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) crosses en route to the employment office – and later towards his mistress’s house – provides no refuge for hope. Abandoned lots, unused train tracks, highways and parking lots look a lot like hell under the SoCal sun. The Banks home offers little respite from this horizontal tyranny. Charlie, his wife Andais (Kaycee Moore) and their three children rarely withhold their unhappiness with life and one another, and it’s hard to imagine any of them getting up and out of these bleak circumstances.

Bless Their Little Hearts’ most incredible scene, a one-take argument between Charlie and Andais, relentlessly outs all their problems and anxieties without thereby alleviating their stresses. Beautiful black-and-white photography immerses us in a family sketched in shades of grey. Virtually all Woodberry’s characters have sympathetic moments, but these are quickly submerged in the dark currents of the odds stacked against them. So esoteric or not, any filmgoer can find things to like (and dislike) about Woodberry’s Banks family.


This article appears on The L Magazine's blog, and can be read here.