Puppeteer, Film Maker Win MacArthur Grants

A film maker who focused his sensitive and perceptive eye on Los Angeles’ black culture and a puppeteer who abandoned his art under severe financial pressure will be named winners today of MacArthur Fellowship grants for the advancement of American art and science.

Charles Burnett, whose 1977 film, “Killer of Sheep,” won the Critics’ Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, will be awarded $275,000.

Bruce D. Schwartz, who took a job in an art gallery when he could not support himself with puppeteering, will receive a $215,000 grant.

Burnett, 44, and Schwartz, 32, are the first black film maker and puppeteer, respectively, to be honored by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, which presents the so-called “genius” grants annually. The foundation’s 15-member selection committee awarded 31 grants this year.

Kenneth Hope, director of the grant program, which has awarded 254 fellowships since 1981, said money is awarded based on creativity and career promise. He said recipients may use the money in any way they see fit.

Other Californians to receive awards today are documentary film maker Jon H. Else of Portola Valley, whose work includes “The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb”; art historian and critic Michael David Kighley Baxandall of Berkeley, a specialist in European art and the Renaissance, and geo-scientist Raymond Jeanloz of Berkeley, noted for his work in mineral physics and in linking modern physics to geophysics.

The Los Angeles recipients said they were shocked, but also honored, to be acknowledged for work that has remained relatively obscure in the United States.

Burnett, whose “Killer of Sheep” was described by a Times critic as a “beautiful and anguished” examination of the life of a slaughterhouse worker, is working to complete a film story of three generations of a black family in Los Angeles. He said he was skeptical of the phone call he received from the foundation.

“I thought it was someone playing a joke,” Burnett said. “It’s kind of hard to believe at first. You don’t just get a MacArthur grant any day of the week.”

Schwartz said he was “utterly flabbergasted” when told he had been honored.

“I had no inkling whatsoever,” he said. “I’m not quite sure I’m in my own body yet.”

Schwartz’s award was “definitely a first in puppet theater,” Hope said. Committee members, shown films of Schwartz in action, were “startled and moved” by his command of the craft, Hope said.

“He has control over every aspect of the performance,” Hope said. “He makes the puppets, he does the script. He stands on stage with the puppets, but he creates an atmosphere in which he is almost invisible. He disappears, in a figurative sense. It’s the puppet that has life.

“He’s a very remarkable artist.”

Schwartz, who as a child asked for puppets at every birthday, started doing shows for neighborhood children when he was 9, earning $3 a performance. His career reached a turning point, however, when he was in high school and began performing for adults and the annual Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura.

Borrowing from Western European and Medieval styles, he expanded his craft to incorporate Indonesian and Japanese puppeteering techniques, he said.

In 1984, he was commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to perform a puppet dance called “Beyond the Comfort of Heavy: A Dance of Balance,” which illustrated the deep symbolism that is characteristic of his other work.

That show, which ran for three months at the Temporary Contemporary museum on Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, featured a masked figure who danced within an illuminated circle of beakers filled with water.

As the puppet danced, Schwartz said, it would pour water into the beakers until, at one point, it discovered an empty beaker and watched the ring of lights go out. The puppet ultimately tore out its heart--a water-filled sponge--to restore the light to the circle.

“I don’t like to say what it represents,” Schwartz said. “It’s essentially a piece about balance.”

His last important show, “Marie Antoinette Tonight,” ran for two weeks at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta in 1986, using music, film, slides and a word processor to make a point about history: That our understanding of it is just the result of small scraps and tidbits of knowledge.

“History only consists of what’s left over,” Schwartz said. “I’ve always been fascinated by that.”

Burned out, struggling to finance himself from one project to another, Schwartz quit puppeteering shortly after that. He said he is not sure he will resume his work, even with the MacArthur grant.

Burnett, a product of South-Central Los Angeles who studied film-making at UCLA, said he will use the grant to help him begin scripts for future projects. His films, including “Killer of Sheep,” “The Horse” and “My Brother’s Wedding,” have been inspired mostly by people he admired while growing up, he said.

The slaughterhouse worker in “Killer of Sheep” struggles to survive and keep his family intact, but he pays a price for that, Burnett said. He said the film, shown more often in Europe than in the United States, is partly a tribute to such heroes.

“Success, for me, is not gaining something materially,” he said. “I feel it’s what you admire about a person.”