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Vampire movies are not hard. Usually these have been good vs easy morality tales, with just a hint of transgressive titillation that is ultimately stamped out by the forces of what the film considers to be "morality". Even the artsier takes on the undead are not conjuring the most obtuse of metaphors. Vampirism is an escape from sexual conformity or gender roles, with the films often hedging on "what if dangerous liberation but too much?". I have not needed the most sophisticated of analytical apparatuses to review these films so far.
With Ganja & Hess we have careened wildly out of the simple genre flicks or dirty art films we have been discussing so far. This is a reckless jump in the murky depths of experimental, surreal, non-linear filmmaking. It is not an easy movie to watch. It is also not an easy movie to discuss. There is a heck of a lot in here beyond its hazy, vague attempt to tell a narrative. Ganja & Hess offers a blunt underlying metaphor of drug addiction (its in the title even), yet is also about so much more. If you just want a clear story told to you scene by scene, Ganja & Hess is not that. If you want a straightforward parable, Ganja & Hess is also not that. I have some ideas as to what this movie is doing, but I have no illusions that I'm going to write the master work today explaining all various twists and turns. Maybe I did not understand the film at all, that is entirely possible.
In 1972, a small independent film studio gave fledgling filmmaker Bill Gunn a few hundred thousand dollars to make a "black vampire film". I imagine that whatever the producers had in mind was something more like Blacula, a blaxploitation crowd pleaser with some blood and some female nudity. Instead Bill Gunn turned in 110 minutes of sweaty sensuality, class anxieties, and surrender to the power of true faith that occasionally also is a vampire movie. Two versions of Ganja & Hess exist. One is a 78 minute attempt to trim the movie down to an erotic monster movie which was released in theaters in the Seventies, then later on VHS under a number of alternate titles. The version I saw is the 110 minute full film as intended by Bill Gunn. Blacula's original print was not donated to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, but Ganja & Hess's was.
The plot of Ganja & Hess is a difficult creature to find, searching for it feels akin to wandering the jungles looking for a mythological cryptid at times. Most of the film's conversations are shot in a peculiar way with only one character on screen. (I suspect this is because Bill Gunn struggled with capturing sound on set and had to re-record the dialog in ADR.) In the first twenty minutes the one-sided style makes Ganja & Hess almost impossible to follow since you are simply unsure which character is which. A lot of scenes happen outside the main linear narrative or might be entirely metaphorical. The film just is this fog of chronology, with no sense of how much time is passing during the narrative.
Our lead is Dr. Hess Green played by Duane Jones, in one of two starring roles in his career, the other being Night of the Living Dead. Dr. Green's assistant, George Meda (Bill Gunn himself) is staying with him at his lavish mansion where they're studying anthropological artifacts from the fictional Myrthian civilization of Africa. George is unstable and suicidal, telling rambling bawdy stories which never get to their point, then composing a letter to the audience about how philosophy is meaningless. He suddenly stabs Hess with a ceremonial Myrthian bone dagger before shooting himself in the heart. Interestingly, both Ganja & Hess and Blacula invent an African mythological connection to the vampire legend, so as to not merely repurpose a European monster.
The dagger transforms Dr. Green into a vampire of sorts. No fangs, no issues with sunlight, but still with the need to feed on the blood of prostitutes. Later, George's estranged wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) demands a room at Green's mansion since she needs a place to stay. Ganja and Hess wind up having sex, getting married, and finally sharing the curse of vampirism.
Now there is a lot more shown in this movie beyond those paragraphs of plot summary. Hess has a son who is able to converse in French but appears in only one scene. There's some office full of people in suits wearing silver masquerade masks which may or may not be a metaphor, but I can't decipher as to what. There is not an objet d'art within Bill Gunn's grasp that he can resist filming and putting into his movie, whether it adds anything or not. Several characters have long brilliantly-written monologues, especially Ganja, who tells a heartbreaking story from her childhood. We have a reverend character (Sam Waymon) who is the narrator at the beginning of the movie but never again.
The Christian aspect of Ganja & Hess is particularly interesting to me. Dr. Van Helsing can slap two candlesticks together to make a cross and that will defeat Dracula, but that is not an act of faith. At least, it is not an act of any sort of demanding faith. The God of the vampire movies we have seen so far is one that asks nothing of its gentlemen protagonists, no sacrifice, no submission. These heroes are the rational rulers, God ordered the world for them, and they have been granted vast imperial Empires thanks to his providence. But Ganja & Hess's religion is more intense, more a power of community. The faith of these people cannot be the empty-minded arrogance of their White oppressors, their faith is that of struggle, pain, and liberation.
Subverting the rules of vampirism is not the point (our vampires seemingly have no issue with the Cross until Dr. Green suddenly dies at the end). Ganja & Hess cares more about black Christianity as an issue of class and culture. Hess is a black man, he'll never not be a black man in America despite his success, but he's an extraordinarily wealthy one. He's got his own Alfred Pennyworth, basically, who Ganja loves to rib at. His household is one utterly without the cultural signifiers of his race: no grits, no R&B music, just the swallowed emotional neutrality of the gentry. Ganja's crude, alluring, unrepentant "blackness" makes her a good foil for the constipated energy Hess radiates.
Ganja is also just an awesome and fun and enormously sexy character. "I'm standing in front of Pan American, and the driver can't miss me, cause I'm that evil."
What destroys Hess is a visit to a regular African America blue collar church with a loud preacher and a community sharing their faith. The most powerful scene of Ganja & Hess does not come from the multiple murders or the terrifying montage of imagery with which Bill Gunn can employ to sell his horror. Rather it comes from Dr. Green in tears, weeping as true feelings of acceptance and common humanity of people like him break through for the first time. Just before his death, Hess has the bright eyes and orgasmic breathing of a man on the most extreme high. He has bee liberated from himself and his class position and false attempts to integrate and be absorbed by a white America that will never let him in. You would think vampirism is the drug. Rather, it appears religion is the more powerful opiate.
It's the filmmaking that really sells the big affects. Ganja murdering a man she's having sex with is intercut with scenes of her silently screaming outside with her hair flowing, and then with a shot of a stone face with blood bleeding out its eyes. Gunn cuts to shots of the Mythrian Civilization several times when the lust for blood overtakes our heroes, and we hear their repetitive chanting in the soundtrack. During Hess's death, the sound mix slowly builds a low humming noise. What is that sound? It's unrecognizable at first. Later the hum grows to dominate over the mix. That sound now is clear. It's hysterical, painful sobs, disembodied from any figure in the scenes.
Ganja & Hess is something special, a vampire film unlike any other. It has had an impressive legacy as an underground cult movie, even getting a full remake from Spike Lee a few years back as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Personally this kind of movie is a bit too much for me. It is good to work for your entertainment sometimes, your mind does need exercise.
Next time: George A. Romero's maybe just as difficult take on the vampire, Martin.
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