Friday, December 01, 2006

I Came So Far for Beauty





























Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) is, like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a disjointed and artful example of the serious black genre film of the early 1970s. But whereas Sweetback told a very simple narrative in a very fragmented way, accruing for itself much moment-to-moment richness, Ganja & Hess is allusive, evocative, lyrical, mythic, and complex. One flows with the stream in Sweetback, even when you hit the rapids. Ganja & Hess is like a pond or a swamp or an estuary--a whole complex "ecosystem" is just lurking there under a pokerfaced still surface.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Zach:

I must see "Ganja & Hess." Meanwhile, I thought I'd offer a response to your superb foot-fetish imagery, from my tribute to Barbara Stanwyck -- Babs' Foot Fetish Page ("The Lady Eve," "Ball of Fire," "Double Indemnity"):

http://cinepad.com/babs/foot_fetish.htm

ZC said...

Jim, thanks for posting that link--I had never noticed before!