Blaxploitation and the arthouse don't often collide, but they have for at least the second time this series, though you could make an argument for three of the ten films I've now watched.
Ganja & Hess definitely put me in mind of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss (not checking the correct number of S's right now) Song in terms of its narrative approach, though you could argue it has more in common, thematically, with Lord Shango, which showcases a slightly inferior version of that approach.
Either way, this was an eerie affair that immediately jumped into the top couple movies in the series, a spot it shares with Sweetback but not Shango.
I'd saved Ganja & Hess for October, knowing that it was considered to be horror as a result of first hearing about it from the blaxploitation marathon they did on Filmspotting. I remembered little else about it from the Filmspotting discussion -- and continued to know little else about it for the first third of its running time.
It was then that I made the key decision to check on Wikipedia to see where I'd failed to properly orient myself, and that at least gave me some bearings. Wikipedia clarified for me that the movie was about an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant stabs him with an ancient cursed dagger. I suppose I saw the stabbing occur, but given the abstruse presentation style of many of the narrative beats of this film, I failed to recognize it for what it was at the time it occurred.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind being lost within Bill Gunn's film. There are certain films you watch where you have don't fully know what's going on, but you know that's not because of clumsiness by the filmmakers. Rather, they are making a mood more than a conventional movie, and sometimes, that mood is all you need.
The mood of Ganja & Hess was indeed carrying me along, but to repeat a refrain that has become a little boring to me, I started watching this movie too late at night, and my new couch is too comfortable. I didn't succumb to any involuntary sleep -- as in, sleep without pausing -- but I did have to take a nap or two. I probably should have saved it for another night, but I'm trying to cram in lots of Halloween movies this month, and will potentially lose some key viewing hours as I go on vacation from Wednesday to Monday. Gotta fit in things when you can.
The good news is, even if you are totally alert or on some kind of uppers, Ganja & Hess is not the sort of movie that lays things out for you. From the jump it is clear this is a movie of gestures, canted camera angles, half-seen images, and particularly, chilling sound design. There is a repeated incantation of sorts in this film, accompanied by what sounds like the ominous humming of a guitar amp not being used properly. Any time this entered the narrative, which was a lot, I found myself going to a place in my mind that the other "horror movies" I'm watching this month (more appropriate to undercut the Halloween movies by calling them merely "slasher movies") were not taking me.
The anthropologist is the Hess, and he's played by Duane Jones. I saw the name in the credits and I saw the man on screen, but it still took me a little while to put together that I was looking at a true horror icon. Jones plays the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which I have to imagine was a factor in Bill Gunn casting him five years later for Ganja & Hess.
The Ganja is the widow of Hess' assistant, whom he killed after the vampiric stabbing. (Some of the sequence of events in this part of the film was a little lost on me, since it's the kind of film that might not be playing in chronological order.) She's played by the very charismatic and naturalistic Marlene Clark. Clark is an actress I recognized, though the only other things I would have seen that she was in -- Sanford & Son and a very small role in Enter the Dragon -- I doubt I would actually know her from, given the size of the role or the amount of time since I've seen it. She does a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half of the film, when she comes under the spell of Hess at his mansion, as she tends to be verbal and he tends to be not.
Again, this movie is more a vibe than a strict story, exploring sex, religion, power dynamics and other provocative isms. It's no coincidence that Hess is an anthropologist, as his studies of native peoples and their iconography also factors into the proceedings.
But again, Ganja & Hess is one of those films where the less you try to analyze it, the more you get out of it. Just letting it wash over you is the best way to go, and wash over me it did.
Just two more months to go. In November I will watch Coffy, and then December is TBD.
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