on naïveté, America and Killer of Sheep

On the evening of Thursday July 7, 2022, I had the pleasure of introducing Killer of Sheep at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. The film screened as part of the Indelible Moments: May I Have This Dance series curated by Edith Kramer. As of today, you can watch Killer of Sheep on Kanopy, a free service with your local library card. Here below is my introduction ~

Likely because of my own current state, my viewings of Killer of Sheep this weekend re-awakened my interest in naïveté and what it means to be made naïve.

I’ve narrowed down the feeling of to feeling gullible. powerless. betrayed and confused. Something like a child. All of us can be made naïve but some of us more so than others. And that has nothing to do with how young or tender our hearts are or simple our heads are but everything to do with power. Naïveté’s reach has a lot to do with our proximity to power—the further you are from power, the more you know what it is to be made naïve.

In early 1970s Watts when Killer of Sheep was filmed, same as today in Watts and today in Oakland and in Berkeley and every where else in this country, America makes naïve out of Black people who expect one foot to walk on the same solid ground that the last foot stepped on. Jobs make naïve out of people who labor their mind & bodies and hope for rest. Parents make naïve out of children’s ambitions, their expectation of safety. We make naïve out lovers who attempt honest love.

If you believe in your right to autonomy only to find yourself surveilled, policed and imprisoned, it isn’t that you are inherently gullible but that you have been made naïve.

If you believe your hard day’s work should earn you a place to live, some days rest and maybe event comfort but you instead end up in unending & dangerous plots to survive, you have been made naïve by capitalism.

This film, so focused on the daily dirt of Black life in a working class community, is included in this series about dance because of a scene in which Stan, the central character, dances with his wife. Maybe when they dance they can be naïve together. Safely believe without burning for it. Expect one foot to move this way while hips sway that way. Expect a song to circle them into a tighter embrace. But they step to each other tenderized and hardened by America’s betrayals. And so even their dance isn’t clean of precarity. Everything outside is inside.

- ruth gebreyesus