DANCING IN THE DARK Sanders and Kaycee Moore find comfort in each other’s arms.

Anyone looking over a list of films that were released 30 years ago would notice that 1977 was a banner year for influential American movies—Annie Hall,Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,Saturday Night Fever. But their eyes might skip right over one of the more significant titles, a little-seen work of art that arguably trumps its fellow class-of-’77 members in terms of profundity. That would be Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s brilliant, peerless look at working-class people in Los Angeles, whose vision of everyday life plays like an inner-city “Song of Myself.”

If you’ve never heard of Burnett’s masterpiece, you’re not alone. After a mere handful of public screenings, the independent drama failed to attract distributors and quietly disappeared. It would resurface periodically at random revival houses, museums and festivals. Fans such as Steven Soderbergh and David Gordon Green repeatedly referred to it as a classic; the movie was later one of the first to be admitted into the National Film Registry, in 1990. Henry Gayle Sanders, who plays Stan, the slaughterhouse worker whose trials and tribulations make up the story’s emotional center, remembers getting phone calls from friends. “They kept teasing me: ‘Henry, man, you’re a national treasure!’ ” the actor, 64, recalls from Southern California. “I had no idea what they were talking about until they told me that Killer of Sheep was going to be preserved. Here was this little job that I did when I was starting out, and now it’s in the Library of Congress.”

Issues over music clearance still kept the movie out of regular circulation, however, and prevented any sort of wider video release. Killer of Sheep appeared to be a victim of fate, critically lauded but stuck in limbo. Until now: After removing “Unforgettable,” the one Dinah Washington song that had been a major sticking point regarding publishing rights, Burnett has finally overcome all legal hurdles, and Milestone Films will give the movie a proper theatrical run starting Friday 30. (Its DVD debut is set tentatively for the end of the year.) “You’d think I’d have to jog my memory to talk about it,” Burnett, 62, says over the phone from his house in Los Angeles. “But it’s become one of those topics of conversation that always spring up, so that’s kept me on my toes. I’m lucky that the few who have seen it really admired what I was trying to do.”

Asked what he felt he was attempting to accomplish with his raw, lyrical exploration of a Watts neighborhood, the director answers without hesitation. “I wanted to tell a truthful story about the working class without imposing my own values on them,” he says. “I started working on Killer of Sheep as a thesis project while I was at UCLA, and a lot of my fellow students were producing movies about folks in these poverty-stricken areas. But, as well intentioned as I’m sure these filmmakers were, they kept romanticizing their subjects in an almost condescending way. They weren’t expressing the complexities and difficulties of these people’s lives. I wanted to show what it was really like to live in that place, to present what you actually saw when you walked out your front door.”

While he was determined to keep any possible personal agendas from influencing the project, Burnett also admits that his frustration with the narrow viewpoints on African-American life in the early ’70s fueled his sense of purpose. “The media had really distorted the black experience,” the director says. “You had Hollywood’s legacy of perpetrating these myths, from Birth of a Nation onward. And then you had blaxploitation, which was another wave of misinformation made by blacks themselves. Granted, they were trying to offer an alternative, but the imagery was so questionable and all the heroes were social misfits. These days, you still don’t have a lot of diversity. There are a lot of talented people who represent a full range of the black experience, and they aren’t working.”

It’s hard not to hope that Killer of Sheep will influence a new generation of artists—of any color—to portray communities on the wrong side of the economic fence. “I hope so,” Burnett says. “But look how things have changed: drugs, education, gang violence. People have it a lot worse now. If I tried to make the movie today, it would end up being a lot more bleak.”

Killer of Sheep opens Fri 30 at IFC Center. Click here for the review.