There was a time when film was slower. Shots were longer and cuts were considered an interruption. Ganja and Hess is of this era. Before you say anything, realize that image means a lot in cinema. Just the amazing imagery and in-depth account of black life without the white gaze make this an important film. The rich world of Dr. Hess unfolds with African connections, the church, and the street all make for a pioneering film with complete disdain for established norms. As a student of black cinema this along with Bush Mama and Killer of Sheep are simply must sees. For the second wave see Daughters of the dust, Dead presidents and Sankofa. While it is no night of the living dead it is an import stop in the history of the horror genre.

Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed four times with an infected knife. It doesn't kill him but leaves him with an insatiable taste for blood. He meets beautiful and strong Ganja (Marlene Clark) and falls in love with her. But can he love a woman with his blood lust? A disastrous, boring and just dreadful attempt to make an art horror film. I was "lucky" enough to see the 110 minute uncut version. I had trouble making it through! The film was made on a very low budget so it looks pretty bad. It also is constantly throwing African music and images in the viewers face (that's where Hess got infected). It's (somewhat) interesting at first but leads to nothing. The sound recording is muddled and the camera-work is so off that I couldn't figure out what I was watching at times. Conversations go on endlessly with no rhyme or reason. Most of them have nothing to do with the plot! This moves VERY slowly and the constant cutting to imagery and African music quickly gets annoying.Acting is no help. Jones (so good in "Night of the Living Dead") is terrible here. He takes forever just to finish one sentence and acts like he's on drugs most of the time. Clark plays Ganja as a foul-mouthed obnoxious woman. I couldn't stand her at all and couldn't figure out WHY Hess loved her! Director Bill Gunn complained that people didn't "get" what he was doing with this film. All he was doing was trying to mix two genres--horror and art--together and it never works. Most importantly this is never once scary or creepy. A sleep-inducing mess not worth your time. Ignore all the critics who are raving about it. They just see a film with virtually no plot and tons of pointless imagery and immediately decide it's an art film and a masterpiece. You know what? It isn't.

Bill Gunn was paid to make Blacksploitation movie, basically a knock off Blacula and instead made an insanely ambitious, lyrical, high art film called "Ganja And Hess", which happened to have an all black cast and involve vampires, though the v-word is never mentioned.One of the defining criterion of Blacksploitation cinema; a black cast working with white writers, directors and producers is absent in G&H. Bill Gunn wrote, directed, and stared in the film, where there are no white characters present anywhere at all (accept briefly in Hess' dreams/visions), eliminating the usual reference to "the man" as villain and planting the discussion singularly in the black community.There is nothing exploitative about any of this, it just happens to be a movie with a low-budget. In fact I think it's the best and most complex film about African American Christianity I've ever seen. Ganja and Hess is not that simple, to say it's spiritual on one hand or a critique on the other, is a matter of whether you prefer Ganja or Hess.Hess (Duane Johnson of Romero's original Night of the Living Dead) is a wealthy anthropologist studying the ancient Mythria tribe in Africa who takes on a new assistant named George (played by Gunn), who begins to appear more and more manic.Hess stops George's first suicide attempt, but George later inexplicably attacks him stabbing him with an ancient knife Hess keeps as a kind of tribal art on his bed stand. George then bathes ritualistically and commits suicide on his knees, naked with a gun shot to the chest.Hess quickly adjusts to his new thirst which is cued by an echoing African chanting and images of tribal ceremonies in a field.Hess drinks blood from a glass, an image later echoed in Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction", a similarly complex religious vampire film (and to think, Anne Rice said she couldn't write both at the same time). Ganja is George's wife fresh from Amsterdam, who knows his "crazy" tendencies, and asks to stay at Hess' home to wait for his return. Ganja is confident and direct where Hess is cool and coy. Ganja berates and insults Hess' butler Archie, only after implying Hess treats him coldly and impersonally. She gages his reaction and when she see's he isn't concerned proceeds to dominate Archie, and subsequently positioning herself as mistress of the house.The couple marry, and Hess seems genuinely in love, while Ganja is genuinely in love with her new position, and not in the least bothered by her belief that Hess killed George for some reason which to her doesn't need explaining. He loves her so much they have their second wedding as he sire's her with the Myrthrian dagger used on him.This scene is as ritualistic as the Church wedding that came before, only now Hess pronounces they will be free of guilt, fear, and sin before knifing her. The sex scenes recalls Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, consisting of ambiguous body close ups and glistening sweat, only at the end of Gunn's scene, when the lights come on, the sweat is revealed to be blood.Hess attends Wayman's church, perhaps put off by Ganja's sleeping with another man, or insisting that he was not dead when they took his body to the field, and in any event, experiences a religious awakening of his own in silent movements across his face like Dryer's "Passion of Joan of Arc".This complicates what had been a simple binary of African ritual/savagery/hedonism to Christian/restraint/morality/love. This binary is further complicated when Hess allows himself to starve to death sitting in the shadow of a cross, and the scene is juxtaposed with a flash black of George killing himself. "The cross is only an instrument of torture; it's the shadow of the cross that creates its meaning. Shadows conquer everything.", says Hess to Ganja during one of their chats.Neither is above reproach for Gunn though, one may be liberating to fault when over-indulgence becomes neurosis and eternal youth resembles eternal adolescence (George's character) while the other may only be repression of cultural traditions, class relations which amounts to ennui and stagnation.I don't think Gunn wants us to pick a side, the film is called Ganja and Hess after all, and neither one's self sacrificing nor the others self absorption seems definitive. "I feel like both a murderer and a victim" George says early on. The rest of the movie plays on this contradictory impasse; the horror of the film comes from the philosophical ambiguity resembling a visually driven "No Exit".Gunn is speaking directly to a black audience, his intended and studio mandated demographic, and though his themes are philosophically universal, they speak specifically to a newly radicalized post-Civil Rights black audience budding between calls for socially conscious realist Nationalism and Black Christian moralism; Hess and Ganja respectively.The images of the field become a place of burial (corpses) and of things past returning (the procession of the ancient tribe). The music by Wayman predicts Animal Collective's droned out psychedelic African tribal chants by thirty years. The rest of the score is upbeat 70's pop, soul, and gospel, all styles that cascade together in the church scene, when the non-digetic music, is reveled as the church band, and a principle structuring element for much of the editing.Ganja and Hess is at minimum a marginalized if not completely forgotten masterpiece of American cinema. It got a standing ovation at Cannes (where it was the only American film entered that year), and ensured no American producer would work with Bill Gunn on a theatrical film ever again. Bill Gunn's corpse is still locked in the cultural cellar, discovered from time to time, but easily (and tragically) ignored in favor of more profitable ventures.

I first heard of GANJA & HESS (1973) on the Internet but, after reading several favorable reviews, I decided to purchase it and I'm glad I did – though I've only watched it once so far. While I absolutely adore the "old" horror films, it's refreshing that once in a while a film comes along that treats the genre with extra sensitivity and maturity: Bill Gunn's approach, while peripheral in intent, is highly original and invigorating. The music score adds that much more to it, while the photography and editing techniques envelop the whole in a truly stunning visual style. It is inconceivable that such a seminal (and relatively recent) piece of work was almost lost to the ravages of time, not to mention the ignorance and pretensions of commercially-minded distributors!The DVD's Audio Commentary, though limited (due to the obvious absence of Gunn and Duane Jones), was quite informative and the cast and crew members involved were certainly enthusiastic, harboring a genuine affection for the film. The essay co-written by Tim Lucas was also very interesting, filling as it does the "gaps" concerning the film's background and its chequered history along the years.I would have liked that the notorious shorter version of the film, BLOOD COUPLE – complete with alternate credits and extra footage, shot by Gunn but discarded when assembling the original director's cut – could have been included on the DVD but, when I put this question to David Kalat (All Day's President), this is what he had to say:"On GANJA & HESS, all of the parties involved in the original version hated and despised the BLOOD COUPLE recut and everything it represented to them. They worked hard, for little pay, to make a Black art film, and found their work abused and maltreated. 25 years later, through the DVD, they found an opportunity to try again. None of them--the producer, the editor, the DP--would have agreed to include the BLOOD COUPLE cut on the DVD, and I respected their wishes. I used Tim's article as a way to describe that alternate version, even if it wasn't otherwise represented."