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.