Exposure: Nu West, ‘To Sleep with Anger’ (1990)

Directed by Charles Burnett, To Sleep with Anger (1990,1 hr., 42 mins.) transposes the spirit of the South and the haunted tenor of the frontier to South Central Los Angeles. When an enigmatic wanderer arrives unannounced, a family’s buried memories and ancestral ties begin to stir. A strange, funny, surreal, and quietly haunting work, Burnett conjures a modern folk parable to mine our fraught, complex, and emotionally resonant relationship to legend, myth, and the American South.

This film is presented as part of Exposure: Nu West, in which the ICA invites recurring guest and Exposure cinema founder Brandon Shillingford to curate a film series for Black History Month. Throughout the month of February, Shillingford will look at how four black Black filmmakers rework and reckon with the American West in their narratives. From Gordon Parks to Charles Burnett to Jordan Peele, Black filmmakers have used the American West not just as backdrop, but as battleground, a space to wrestle with inheritance, legacy, and American mythmaking.

Nu West spans the traditional West to the transcendent: Buck and the Preacher and Thomasine & Bushrod reimagine the outlaw and pioneer; To Sleep with Anger translates Southern folklore and mysticism into South Central Los Angeles; and Nope interrogates spectacle, authorship, and the cinematic hagiography that built America’s mythology. Together, these films ask: Who gets to claim the frontier? How do Black filmmakers reshape a mythology built to burden them? What happens when the West, as land, genre, and legend, becomes a site of spiritual and cinematic reckoning?

Exposure: Nu West dates:
February 4: Buck and the Preacher (dir. Sidney Poitier, 1972)
February 6: Nope (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)
February 17: Thomasine & Bushrod (dir. Gordon Parks Jr., 1974)
February 25: To Sleep with Anger (dir. Charles Burnett, 1990)