Darker than Blood: GANJA AND HESS (1973)

Valentines Day means red hearts and flowers, dinners by candlelight, hands reaching across the table. Like this dubious 'holiday,' horror films are defined by their cliches: damsels in nightgowns holding chandeliers; undead hands reaching from a mound of dirt; stock footage full moons hitting your eye as a distant howl hits your ear; frightened horses..."easy... steady... steady, girl." Such a well trod path ensures we don't get lost. It's as easy as falling off a bike... into a cozy, well-defined abyss.

But if you are an African-American artist making a designated 'black' horror film, your cliche palette is doubly restricted. There is no 'in-between' for a black character in a Hollywood movie, no matter the genre: either shiftless craps-shooting loafers or violent super-sexual pimps on the one side, devout churchgoing disciplined members of the community, judges and police captains, on the other (or oscillating in-between, like Little Joe in Cabin in the Sky). The black man embodies only these extremes. Come the 70s, the split remains, albeit the churchgoing habit altered by a less passively idealist dogma. In black horror, for every rainbow-feathered pimp Blacula bites, you need a monologue by an idealistic young self-educated activist; for every jive-talking voodoo priest you need a noble cop fighting white corruption; for every pusher, a guy handing out outreach pamphlets bemoaning cop complacency. But it's got to be freaky to count as blaxploitation, but it's got to be cognizant of a social message too.

But what about black characters who range far and wide afield from these extremes, who dwell beyond good and evil; who are educated, affluent intellectuals who aren't really interested in wading down in the poverty, except maybe to cull easy prey; who are natural aristocrats that send their sons to Parisian schools to escape America's backwards racism altogether. These characters are perhaps too complicated not to confound knee-jerk bipoloar expectations for a 'black' horror film. To see what it's like when a black character isn't weighed down with this either/or albatross anchor you have to go to abroad.

February is Black History Month, which means on all the news channels the 'message' flows, occasionally, albeit diluted by 'safe' social commentary (i.e. George Washington Carver rather than Angela Davis; Dr. King rather than Malcolm X), which helps at least posit the problem of getting beyond the vibrant strutting stud vs. progressive agitprop paradigm. Nowhere in the mainstream TV's little digressions lurks the question of whether the African-American experience might be represented in a risky, artistic, dangerous, even abstracted manner, or if 'intelligent' blackness need be rendered only through either dignified bourgeois Ms. Daisy blandness or Spike Lee politically astute anger. The question might be asked and answered by black filmmakers, but their more dangerous films are already ignored by a wary white bourgeois public afraid of being harangued and bummed out, who give 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight Best Picture without seeing actually seeing them, yet ignore or decry black films that presume to tell 'other' black tales, where the blackness comes alive in ways white critics aren't comfortable with. In other words, if we (the white audience) are not able to get 'self-back-patting' liberal guilt assuagement through seeing your film, either crying in solidarity or squirming with awareness, we don't know what you want from us. As your movie plays on, we start to get nervous in a way that has nothing to do with education and expansion of horizons. Only a few white critics, the brave and feckless, are turned on rather than scared by seeing blackness truly freed, not just from its centuries of shackles, and economic woes, but its mortality, nationality, and even identity, until we both merge in either flames of a burning city or flames of a unifying field of pure being.

One case in point: GANJA AND HESS (1973) a weird one-off kind of genre-unto-itself horror film that refuses the bipolar limits of the cinematic 'black experience,' refuses even the tropes of casual art or surrealism, instead delving into them all with the tasteful restraint of someone building a whole cinematic language without resorting to ponderousness or didacticism in the process. Its creator, African American playwright/actor Bill Gunn, was given money to make a black horror film modeled after AIP's BLACULA (1972). That film had proven a surprise hit, especially among black audiences. But Blacula was directed by a white man. Producers figured that if they got a black man to make a black vampire movie they'd clean up, and have a truer, grittier, or at least cheaper, film.

But instead of a blacker Blacula, Gunn made a nouvelle vague semi-experimental horror love story that seemed, on casual viewing, to be a choppy, fragmented mess; deceptively framed, with strange sound mixing, and an impossible to follow storyline. BLACULA's appeal of course was in the name. The name was all you needed. Seeing it on a marquee, you knew just what to expect, and it delivered. But no one could possibly expect GANJA AND HESS, for there'd never been anything remotely like it. If you sunk some of your own $$ as a producer into it you might be pretty pissed...

BUT if you stuck with it, watch the whole thing without judgment, you suddenly realize the film is delivering something brand new and unique, beyond any duality of white or black filmmaking. The effect is profound, startling, new, unforgettable...

Most of all it resonates as a true love story, with all the heady rushes and disastrous fall-outs that implies.

Not least of its assets are the title characters: the rich, isolated doctor Hess (Duane Jones) and Ganja (Marlene Clark), the latter very unusual type of strong black woman who manages to assert herself very strongly, without rustling feathers, without being bitchy or unsexy, or moralistic, or judgmental. Watching her move in on Dr. Hess you are seeing a character you've never really seen before in a film (at least I haven't). She and Hess are fully complex, morally ambiguous adults, antithetical and ambivalent. As in the best tragic figures of Shakespeare, they have the guts to admit they don't really care if other people die. They are characters dealing with blackness, as opposed to being representations of blackness

I love Nick Pinkerton's description:

Hired to crank out a Blacula knock-off (with a drug-joke title), Gunn instead wrote a surreal love triangle among black sophisticates, devoid of sex-machine phoniness, and directed it in a muttered, disorienting style, with a strange brew of Afro-Euro symbolism. Duane Jones is Dr. Hess, a gentleman scholar studying a pre-Christian African blood cult; Stop's gorgeous, sloe-eyed Marlene Clark is Ganja, as lively and droll as Hess is lethargic. Gunn himself plays the turbulent artist who infects the doctor. He had a genius for writing monologues, and delivers them with absorbing intensity, especially in his character's schizo suicide dream of playing both murderer and victim, showing Gunn's fascination with the divided self.

When seeking a way to wrap your narrative-expectations around Gunn's "muttered, disorienting style," it helps to have a bit of a grasp of black cinema history. The films, for example, of African American pioneer filmmaker Oscar Micheux were notoriously mismatched and fragmented, as if the audience was handed a stack of coupons, leaflets, half-finished letters, and chapbooks and told to read through them at random and let the complete novel form in their brains. That occasionally it would was either evidence of genius or a viewer's paranoia. For sure, there's that feeling with Gunn's film too; you feel that some shots must be missing. Seemingly disconnected scenes (are whole pages of exposition and explanation in GANJA missing? Was the DVD I saw incomplete?) come together in your mind as you watch it, creating a delayed sink pull drag effect, as if by the time you figure out that something's chasing after you, it's too late to escape. Soon you're dead... but... why, are you still running? Was death waiting for you to catch up to it, or has it already moved on?

George Romero showed brave social put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is casting by having Jones in the lead of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and it's perhaps no coincidence that Jones plays the lead in GANJA AND HESS. Like his character in DEAD, Jones' Hess is an intelligent black man with no time or interest in proving it to white people, or hiding it or being subservient for white acceptance, etc. We see Hess's intellectual strength, fatherly tenderness and icy reserve, for example, when he visits his son at boarding school, and the pair have conversation in fluent French, a reminder of the way so many black artists expatriated to Paris in order to escape racism. Even so Hess remains closed-off, aloof, abstracted, not a bad father or a good one, but something like how a genuine intellectual thinker (not a cliche'd dotty Einstein hobbit or megalomaniac, but a reserved, distracted yet immensely perceptive full-grown man) would be, even to himself, even if he tried not to be (and smart enough not to let it get him down). And that may not sound like much, until you realize every black dad in movies is always either a strong perfect lion of a dad like Larry Fishburne in BOYZ IN THE HOOD or a drug-dealing thug like Samuel Jackson in MENACE II SOCIETY. Jones is neither, yet with elements of both-- he is not trying to be 'a dad' or not to be one.

Examples of the still-flowing racism a character like Hess (or artist like Gunn) would endure were all over the papers when GANJA AND HESS opened. It got a lot of aghast walk-outs from both audiences expecting BLACULA 2 and snooty festival curators, at least here in the States. When it was the only American film selected to represent America in the 1973 Cannes Critic's week, Gunn wrote the following letter (excerpted) to the NY Times on May 13, 1973 (following the tepid reviews of his film, including outright admissions by critics of walking out):

"If I were white, I would probably be called "fresh and different." If I were European, "Ganja and Hess" might be that little film you must see." Because I am black, I do not even deserve the pride that one American feels for another when he discovers that a fellow countryman's film has been selected as the only American film to be shown during "Critic's Week" at the Cannes Film Festival, May, 1973. Not one white critic from any of the major American newspapers even mentioned it."

Indeed one wonders, would this film be recognized if it were released for the first time even today? Probably not. Now that our culture has grown further distracted by CGI and MTV whiplash editing, it would be impossible for teenagers to stick with the disorienting jaggedness long enough for the hypnotic effect to kick in.  I confess I spent the first ten minutes kind of puttering the living room, keeping an eye on the image to see if the shot ever changed, but not really tuned into it at all. It might actually have been beneficial to do that, it turns out, as my unconscious was tuning in while I was distracted with laundry or whatever I was doing. But would I have lasted that long if I was a film critic seeing this in a screening room on a busy day of deadlines?

On the other hand, Gunn is right: if the film was French, these Times critics would have pissed all over themselves trying to 'discover' it first. I often wonder what Godard movies would play like in France, without subtitles, as subtitles fit so well his post-structural imagery, and so much of his dialogue overlaps or is mixed low making full comprehension impossible without them. They seen sloppy and haphazard anyway, but the subtitles and foreign language give them enough cultural cachet/distance that, as Americans, we don't feel ashamed by him. Gunn's film basically answers my question, and the answer is yes. If GANJA had subtitles and everyone spoke French throughout (instead of only in the boarding school sequence), it would have become a new wave classic. (And that letter proves Gunn himself knew that. too).

But there's a trick to appreciate this film, as I say- you have to let go of having everything spelled out, you have to trust that your unconscious understands the background whispering, the disjointed meanings, even as you scratch your head and think about doing the dishes. Stick with it, let the trance overtake you (the way it might for Jess Franco or Antonioni), and your unconscious will reward you.

The main thing that kept me rooted to the film even during the first 1/4 was the incredible electronically-warped soundtrack: African chants and spirit calls echo throughout the film like an ancient tribe stumbled upon a flanger and a feedback amp and managed to send their chants forward through time. In Gunn's world, the distant past and the future are both relatively unfixed: the past can roar up to grab you and the future is already biting you and draining your blood so it can survive into another day. Gunn uses a growing feedback squall to indicate when our vampire hero starts to jones for a sanguinary hit, making us aware of the link between vampirism and heroin addiction, or alcohol, the way a person who's been waiting for 4PM cocktail hour since he woke up will snap the head off anyone who suggests, at 3:30, they go see a movie instead.

The droning demand for blood and the ghostly presence of African drum on the soundtrack make the ethereal score an audio-mimetic equivalent of the ghosts that haunt Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's play, The Emperor Jones. An early suicide in the film is set to music that gradually echoes into abstract noise as the camera circles around the self-inflicted carnage, creating a dizzying POV sense of a soul suddenly freed of its body, no ears to translate the dissonant sound waves into music.

Is this surreal echoing booming what a tree sounds like if it falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it? I got a panic attack when a similar effect was done on the song "I can't live (If living is without you)" in Roger Avery's RULES OF ATTRACTION. Watching this scene it was like that panic attack finally blow its own brains out, like a rose from the tip of the crown chakra had been plucked. More than any other 'vampire' film, 'black' film, or even 'white' film, GANJA AND HESS dares to examine sound and vision that lie past the point where there are eyes and ears left to see and hear them. It re-imagines the Bluebeard legend as a chance for forgiveness and admission of true and refreshing ambivalence about life.

What's missing in the film is a serious line of continuity, and that's where Gunn relies on cliche, as we "know" the missing scenes (such as continuity and establishing shots) the way Coltrane assumes we know the melody of "My Favorite Things." Clearly, a mix of budget constraints and artistic control necessitated some of these choices, but they work because they force us to fill in the blanks, like watching a foreign language film without subtitles forces us to notice mise en scene in an abstract composition sense. And then, when Ganja shows up, she's so warmly human and yet so strong that the film kicks into gear; the sound evens out, the roses all but bloom in our heart chakra. We've been straining to get past Hess's alienating persona, so we're sensitized and ready for her sensual assault. I wont spoil it, but about halfway through the film she delivers a long, tearful monologue, lit only by firelight, and the subsequent eruption of happiness and music afterwards is one of the most powerfully cathartic cinematic moments I've had in awhile, and the long single take monologue in dark lighting is what helps catapult it. In short, Gunn uses his limitations and long takes for powerful effect, mixing the agonizing real-time emotional build-ups with ecstatic release.

All the strain pays off.

Looking at this truly unique film as a whole is to return to the question: How can a black artist be true to himself, relevant to the pop cultural landscape, and embrace the darker recesses of his black ancestry all while investigating topics like the difference between our physical senses and dreams, or the way ancestral ghosts chant to us as they travel in the blood rushing through our ear drums. If a black artist be continually burdened with conveying the 'entire' black experience like a fractal in all aspects of his work, then GANJA is a way that this fractal is both circumvented and transfigured into a whole new form. Gunn also addressed this in his response to criticism in the Times:

"Another critic wrote - where is the race problem? If he looks closely, he will find it in his own review."

This innate 'extra' requirement for black art is like a lead albatross affixed to every struggling black author or artist, especially when it comes to knee-jerk bourgeois liberal dogma. Interestingly, it's also a problem faced by Dr. Hess in the film, leading him eventually to accept his own disintegration. Knowing the only thing that can hurt him is the shadow of a cross over his heart, Hess decides to get born again down at the local church. Well, sometimes, merely climbing out of a swimming pool can be a true baptism, just like sometimes raggedy scraps of African-American film can come together as galvanizing art, and sometimes that art can be recognized.... by the French. Amen.

 (Special thanks to poet/performance artist Tracie Morris for turning me onto this film and informing sections of this review, and, for being the place I found that cool quote, The Temple of Schlock.')