CONTEXTUALIZING THE EARLY CINEMATIC WORKS OF BILL GUNN
Dec 2022
(Essays on this site are from my time at NYU. This essay was for a Film History course and I decided to write about Gunn after seeing the 35mm Director’s Cut at MOMA and being floored by it. I briefly spoke to Sam Waymon, the film’s composer, after the screening and hearing about Gunn’s utter volition to get his work made kept me inspired all semester.)
  In the opening sequence of Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess' (1973), the billowing voice of musician Sam Waymon (brother to Nina Simone) echoes the traditional gospel hymn “I Know It Was the Blood,” overlayed by still, intercut frames of marble statues emanating in agony. The montage continues by documenting Waymon, also the film’s composer and Gunn’s roommate, leading a sunday service in an entirely black church, the visual aesthetic marked by the 16mm film stock and a cinema-verite sensibility that emerges from the sheer necessity of a $350,000 budget. The actual edit breaks linear narrative filmmaking tradition, given that the crew only had one shot at capturing Waymon’s performance in front of a genuine crowd of worshippers with a single camera. Now, the rest of the horror-romance’s drama is bookended by authentic, yet esoteric depictions of prayer and life in Nyack’s black community, muddling the line separating what is staged and documented in Gunn’s work that redefines its genre.

    The images and sounds described (significantly more avant-garde, if not less protruding in comparison to blaxploitation films of the era) methodically establish writer/director Bill Gunn’s cinematic approach to portraying Black Americans. Within the film’s first five minutes, it is clear that Gunn’s interest in the moving image lies in communicating alternative ideas about race and identity; That black filmmakers aren’t obligated to revolve their art around black suffering or black drama. More specifically, Gunn was attempting to dismantle the prominent social tendency among white audiences who expected black artists to focus on “black conflict,” not conflict itself, despite the expectation not being the same for white artists.

    Regardless of his success in multiple mediums and an ever-increasing appreciation for his diverse body of work, most film scholars consider Gunn’s career to be truncated due to his consistently hapless attempts at launching films off the ground after the financial failure of Ganja & Hess and his untimely death at the age of 54. He has yet to become a household name, but the artist’s influence in independent filmmaking and his undeniably humanistic contribution to cinema is more deserving of an investigation than the countless, endlessly cataloged filmmakers whose works have aged to provide a lack of inherently relevant moral values.

Early Years
    Gunn was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he’d plan his weekends around the local movie houses’ screening schedules. He’d later describe his younger self as not quite fitting in, though his love for cinema would compensate for his awkwardness among peers.¹

    After dropping out of high school, serving in the military, and studying art at the University of Pennsylvania, he would move to New York and find his path as a performer on the stage. A decade’s worth of stellar theatrical work in Manhattan led to close friendships with James Dean and Montgomery Clift, success acting in off-broadway productions and television, as well as playwriting that would change the course of his life and turn him into an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood.

    Gunn’s reputation rose after contributing to The Angel Levine (1970) and The Landlord (1970) as a screenwriter, before he would be offered a picture-deal from Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. This would make him only the fourth black director (after Gordon Parks Sr., Ossie Davis, and Melvin Van Peebles) to helm a major studio motion picture.


STOP! (1970)
    In his ultimately unreleased feature directorial debut, Gunn was initially granted the creative freedom to craft a story revolving around polyamory, homosexuality, and domestic unrest. Stop! would be shot on location in Puerto Rico and feature extensive, albeit motivated nudity against the backdrop of a crumbling, interracial marriage.

Unfortunately, studio executives changed their minds about Gunn’s creative liberties and would spend three years marketing a severely cut-down, X-rated version of the film before scrapping its release altogether. To this day, the film is only available to the public online as a low quality VHS rip made from a 90-minute version of Gunn’s originally 180-minute work.

Despite Stop! never getting the proper theatrical distribution Warner Bros. promised, Gunn still managed to screen the film around, including to producer Jack Jordan of the newly established Kelly-Jordan Enterprises. The company was one of the first to be co-owned by a black financial partner, as well as to define itself as a black-oriented production company placing emphasis on art films. Jordan would tell the New York Times “we’re not interested in producing a colored Doris Day movie… only interested in quality films,” the seemingly perfect fit for Gunn, whose priority  (despite the destruction of his previous film) was maintained: to craft emotional and intellectually stimulating work that also delivered a truthful voice, unconfined to what audiences were to expect from black artists.² That and to not have to adhere to a studio’s demands for a change. Gunn would cement his relationship with the company and agree to write and direct his next project for them.


GANJA & HESS (1973)

Ganja & Hess would shoot in the summer of 1972, mostly on Gunn and Waymon’s property in Westchester county with some scenes covered at the Brooklyn Museum. The entirely black crew would include editor Sam Pollard as an assistant editor, and the film would be Duane Jones’ return to screen acting since the success of Night of the Living Dead (1968).

The film premiered at Cannes, where European critics understood Gunn’s uneasy but distilled edit. It would later be named by the festival as one of their ten greatest selected films of the 1970s. Despite the high praise in Europe, financiers would be unhappy with the film’s recherché cut, having expected something more commercial and accessible for mainstream audiences. Distributors would move forward by retitling and cutting the film down severely for its American release, prompting prominent crew members and Gunn himself to disown the film, even taking his name off the final product.

As for Kelly-Jordan Enterprises, Ganja & Hess would be the final film in the firm’s short-lived career (slated projects preceding their collaboration with Gunn included Maya Angelou’s Georgia, Georgia (1972) and James Baldwin’s unproduced The Inheritance). Gunn’s botched feature would be slandered by American critics upon its opening in New York and would play in only a handful of theaters in LA before closing. The film’s financial losses, in addition to the indefinite limbo that became of Baldwin’s project, would act as one of many unlucky forces pressing Kelly-Jordan to close its doors, before they had a chance to move forward with a promised sixteen “quality black-oriented motion pictures.”

In response to the negative criticism, Gunn sent a disheartened letter to the New York Times calling out white critics and expressing his anger regarding the actualized consequences white arrogance has on black art, including against his own film. Gunn closes his letter, writing, “Maybe if the black film craze continues, the white press might even find it necessary to employ black criticism.”³ It could be argued that Gunn’s directing style didn’t have a fair shot among U.S. audiences whether white critics supported the film or not, but seeing as critical acclaim for the film has only grown among cinephiles and critics alike, it is certain that the foundation of Gunn’s reactionary letter (and therefore, his overall indictment of white criticism) has always been alive in in the eyes of the public conscience.


AFTER GANJA

In the years following the brief lives of Ganja & Hess and Stop!, Gunn would go on to continue writing plays and unproduced screenplays, as well as attempt to get an experimental black soap opera running known as Personal Problems (1980). Though it would never be picked-up, footage has since been repurposed and made available by Kino Lorber, offering the closest glimpse at could have been of Gunn’s screen-work after Ganja & Hess. His final onscreen performance would be in close friend Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground (1982), a black filmmaker whose life and work contain strong parallels to that of Gunn’s.

Gunn’s work has survived and been restored, partly because of Ganja’s mysterious erasure after being praised at Cannes, his inarguable proximity to notable figures like James Baldwin, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and especially due to frequent screenings of a salvaged director’s cut of Ganja & Hess at the Museum of Modern Art. These screenings have revived interest in the writer’s filmmaking career over the last several decades, and are likely to blame for the film’s high definition releases on home video.

Over the course of researching Gunn’s life, it became clear that his film career never fully realized into becoming what he had hoped for it to be.  Additionally, it’s important to note that Gunn never wanted his race to be erased in context to his work, instead, for white audiences and producers to quit projecting the limitations of what black films could be about. In retrospect, his most popular film virtually did not exist to the American public upon its release and his attempt at breaking through the film industry never again reached the heights it did in the early seventies, or that his theatrical and written works enjoyed throughout his career.

Nonetheless, the specificity of his voice, which demanded no less than complete acceptance of his work without pandering to expectations set by white audiences, as well as following through with said philosophy and applying it to the backbone of each of his works without suscepting to external contradiction (even if this never resulted in another invitation to direct a film from a studio), warrants comprehensive recognition from film scholars and attention from independent filmmakers themselves.


Closing Thoughts
After Gunn’s death, tributes from artists and writers mainly focused on the unambiguous values present within his work and expressed by him. Writer Greg Tate said it best when he inquired Village Voice readers to “imagine a world where Miles Davis was disallowed from recording after Kind of Blue or where Toni Morrison was only known as the author of The Bluest Eye. I don’t think, I know, that if Gunn had been making a film a year after Ganja & Hess our cinema would have been transformed as Miles and Morrison have transformed our own music and literature.”⁴

Works Cited
  1. Gunn, quoted in Adams, “Bill Gunn,” 56; Euvrard, “Bill Gunn,” 161; Lino and Bryan, “Interview with Bill Gunn,” p. 45.
  2. Gent, “Black Films Are In, So Are Profits,” The New York Times, July 18, 1972, p. 22
  3. Gunn, “To Be a Black Artist,” The New York Times, May 13, 1973 p. 121.
  4. Tate, “Bill Gunn, 1934-89,” Village Voice Vol. 34, Iss. 17, p. 98

Sources Consulted
  • Artists Space. “Till They Listen: Bill Gunn Directs America” Artistsspace.org, 2021.
  • Benshoff, Harry M. “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?,” Cinema Journal Vol. 39, No. 2 (2000), p. 31-50.
  • David, Marlo D. “Let It Go Black: Desire and the Erotic Subject in the Films of Bill Gunn”
  • Harris, Brandon. “Bill Gunn Surfaces At BAM,” Filmmaker Magazine.com, 2010.
  • Lacava, Stephanie. “Sam Waymon on his creative partnership with Bill Gunn,” Screenslate.com, 2021.
  • Ryfle, Steve. “The Eclipsed Vision of Bill Gunn: An African-American Auteur's Elusive Genius, from Ganja & Hess to Personal Problems,” Cineaste.com, 2018.
  • Sieving, Christopher. “Pleading the Blood”
  • Wayman, Sam. Brief discussion after Ganja & Hess MOMA Screening, Summer 2022.







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