It Could Happen Again Phil Collins It Could Happen Again Collin Raye

By PHIL NOBILE JR.

On June 22, 2014, Spike Lee'due south Kickstarter-funded feature, DA SWEET Blood OF JESUS, screened for the get-go fourth dimension. Moments earlier the screening, information technology revealed that the moving-picture show is really a remake of the 1973 horror-art moving-picture show Ganja & Hess. There'due south an like shooting fish in a barrel joke in here most Lee learning from his experience remaking OLDBOY that if you're going to remake a cult film, stay abroad from beloved titles and go for the deep cutting.

It's non all that surprising that Lee was able to proceed a hat on his new film'southward lineage - relatively speaking, not many people have seen the original Ganja & Hess. And it's maybe equally unsurprising that the nearly-forgotten film has returned from the dead in a new form, as it seems to have been doing just that over and over for decades.

GANJA & HESS played theaters in its original form for less than a week in 1973 earlier it was pulled from distribution, re-cut, retitled and forgotten. While the film was pitched (and financed) as a horror flick, it's closer in tone to Nicolas Roeg'due south inscrutable, non-linear THE Man WHO Fell TO EARTH, which GANJA & HESS predates by three years. Director Bill Gunn'south shooting script allegedly contained more than traditional, mainstream horror elements. Gunn later claimed he intended all along to remove most of them, very intentionally leaving a frustrating merely weirdly resonant meditation on addiction, cultural extinction and the struggle of the "Blackman" (Gunn'south term) to retain his identity.

Nosotros become early hints of Gunn's preoccupation with the slippery nature of identity: the motion-picture show begins with a minister (Sam Waymon) discussing his organized religion in voiceover, accompanied by handheld, documentary-manner shots of him commanding a church service. But we presently find out that the minister'south master job is quite unlike - he's a commuter for Dr. Hess Green (Dark OF THE LIVING DEAD's Duane Jones), and nosotros acquire from some oblique exposition that this well-to-exercise "doctor of anthropology and geology" is studying artifacts from an extinct civilization of African blood-worshippers called the Myrthians. As the surviving coiffure members note on the blu-ray commentary, seeing a respected, affluent black man onscreen, being chauffeured effectually New York in a Rolls Royce, was quite a bit of civilisation daze, and was likely a hell of a way to starting time your film in 1973.

Hess studies dead civilizations; Gunn's camera slyly suggests the medico is also function of i. That's about every bit overtly political as the movie gets: there are no rallying cries for equality or quaint-but-clumsy speeches nearly race, but frame after solitary frame of Gunn'due south Blackmen occupying nigh-deserted bars, sparsely populated streets and big empty rooms. Even dialogue scenes are framed in ways that isolate the individual. As Hess quietly ponders a relic and dreams of ancient Myrthia, at that place's a genuine feeling of mournfulness, of mortality, of retentiveness bleeding out into history.

The plot, such as it is, is fix in motility when Hess hires George Meda (played by the film'due south managing director) as his assistant. We find out every bit abruptly as Hess does that Meda is quite out of his mind. After dinner, Hess finds Meda sitting in a tree, threatening to hang himself in Hess' chiliad (hands the moving-picture show's funniest substitution, in which Hess asks Meda to consider the amount of problem his suicide would bring to "the only colored on the block"). Meda then gives a long speech about his suicidal impulses with a stalactite of snot dangling precariously from his mustache. In the very next scene, for reasons the viewer is never given, he attacks Hess in bed, stabbing him with the Myrthian dagger, an act which transforms Hess into a blood drinker (the give-and-take "vampire" is never used in the picture show).

Thinking he'south killed Hess, Meda takes a bath, brushes his teeth (using his cloudy bathwater), and kills himself. Next, Hess is seen sitting up in bed, no worse for wear, and upon discovering Meda'southward body begins to beverage his blood. Much of this film can't rightly qualify as horror, but the sight of Jones slurping congealed claret off the bath floor is a moment of 18-carat revulsion (reportedly for the actor as much as the audience), and says everything the film aims to about addiction.

Meda ends up in Hess' walk-in freezer, and Hess begins the life of an addict - petty theft from a blood depository financial institution, cruising bad neighborhoods for his fix. The commentary isn't terribly subtle, just it's delivered with a measured hand. Soon Meda'due south estranged married woman Ganja (Marlene Clark) shows upwardly looking for her husband. She finds him in Hess' walk-in freezer. From hither the motion-picture show becomes a kind of love story, earlier sending the championship characters downwardly a route of increasing debasement and self-loathing to feed their craving. Equally their addiction brings them together, information technology slowly drains their humanity. METAPHOR!

I'one thousand not quite in the "masterpiece" camp on this motion-picture show, just I've been fascinated by it for over 20 years (I watched a sort of incomprehensible 16mm print back in 1992). On a offset viewing, the pic ofttimes feels a bit patchwork and unwieldy in trying to get even the basic narrative setup across, every bit if Gunn has and then much to say, simply is contesting his own framework in the process. And his subtext feels at times as confusing as his talky, wandering narrative. The Christian church scenes are messy, sweaty $.25 of handheld vérité, while the flashbacks/dreams of the Myrthian Queen are shot in loving, elegant deadening motion. Is he criticizing the Western European eclipsing of African culture? It ofttimes seems and then, only the film'south finale suggests otherwise.

Similarly, posing Ganja and Hess as a well-off black couple in 1973 seems a deliberate, progressive stance. Simply why are they so portrayed as such assholes near their condition? Hess' blackness butler is a constant object of the couple's ridicule and derision (and of Gunn's also; the manager literally robs him of all identity in well-nigh every shot, his head cut off by the top of the frame in nearly all of his scenes). Is he criticizing Ganja and Hess for their bourgeois social status, or the butler for his willing subjugation? Or both? And the film'south final shots are guaranteed to frustrate equally much as they resonate.

But what seem like problems with the picture show begin, on repeated viewings, to feel similar stubborn badges of honor. And you brainstorm to realize information technology'south not that Gunn CAN'T brand a more traditional story; he simply refuses to. (There are 17 minutes of deleted scenes on YouTube which connect the details of the evasive plot; Gunn shot them and threw them away.) In that location are just enough moments in the pic to show yous that Gunn could accept easily gone a more mainstream route: the motion picture is beautiful when it's meant to be cute; the use of ambient sound is innovative, about masterful. Gunn is not an amateur. But non every movie is willing to run across yous halfway. There are films that are fun to sentinel; Ganja & Hess compels you to watch. In that location are films that enquire more questions than they reply; Ganja & Hess answers nil questions, nor does information technology aim to. Possibly that's why it lingers in the brain.

It's such a cheap bit of irony that a moving-picture show rife with subtext about a dying culture devouring itself was carved up and shortened past over 30 minutes to brand information technology more than palatable to the blaxploitation crowd. As the legend goes, Gunn took a single print with him to Cannes, where it received a continuing ovation and was named one of the ten best American films of the decade (in 1973, simply all the same). New York critics were less impressed, and Gunn'due south movie was pulled from release after playing less than a week in 1 theater, subsequently which its distributors hired another filmmaker to re-cut the film into the 76 minute Blood Couple (also released in diverse formats and markets as Black Evil, Blackness Vampire, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Vampires of Harlem, and Double Possession for good measure out). Stories vary, just at some indicate Gunn stashed the uncut impress from Cannes at the Museum of Modern Art, and once the original negative was reworked, this became the just surviving impress of Gunn'south original cut, and remained then for nearly ii decades. (For the whole, amazing history of the film'south rescue from oblivion, check out the great Video Watchdog article by Tim Lucas and David Walker, reprinted on the DVD. Reading it, 1 realizes it'south nothing less than a miracle that the moving-picture show exists at all.)

Gunn never directed some other film (he started work on the Muhammad Ali biopic THE GREATEST, merely was replaced past Monte Hellman). He returned to the stage and television, and ended up on the set of "The Cosby Show" as one of Bill Cosby's poker buddies. Gunn died in 1989. In the end, the burial of GANJA & HESS perfectly illustrated the kind of cultural extinction which preoccupied the filmmaker.

Fittingly, the picture show refused to remain buried. A grass-roots movement to restore the moving-picture show culminated in a DVD release in 1998. Today an even more fully restored blu-ray is available. Amazon will even stream the motion picture to you for $3.99. And early reviews of DA Sweet Claret OF JESUS advise that Spike Lee might have given the tale however another cinematic resurrection. Though reactions from the film'southward premiere describe a fun tone that's lite-years from Gunn's picture, the plot descriptions coming out of the initial screening sound eerily accurate to the original. It'due south amazing that we alive in a globe where GANJA & HESS has been remade, and way more astonishing that said remake might really be expert. But sight unseen, information technology sounds as if perhaps Lee has engaged the cloth correctly. And much to my surprise, I'm finding the story of GANJA & HESS calling to me once once more.

PHIL NOBILE JR is a writer/director of non-fiction television projects, including the characteristic-length A&Eastward documentary HALLOWEEN: THE Within STORY (2010.) He is a contributing writer for badassdigest.com and its sis print publication, Nascency.MOVIES.DEATH.

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Source: http://www.collinsporthistoricalsociety.com/2015/03/

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