Ganja & Hess

In the context of black parallel culture in the 1970s, Ganja & Hess is a unique project that contains motifs traditionally associated with horror movies and trash productions, but it never slides into superficiality; on the contrary, it presents those motifs in a purely artistic style. Of the other black films of the time, only the formalistically radical Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song comes the closest to Bill Gunn’s movie, but even the former has more in common with what is traditionally understood as blaxploitation, as it panders to the mood of the target audience. Ganja & Hess can be seen as the black equivalent of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films, though it doesn’t contain so many surreal moments. Like Jodorowsky’s seventies films The Mole and The Holy Mountain, this film was also conceived as a spiritual and sensual initiation in which Christianity is mixed with primitive mysticism, carnality and a murder ballad. Ganja & Hess primarily exhibits a number of similarities to primitive African films, which serve as the cinematic equivalent of cathartic stories in which traditional values and moral principles are made clear through fantastical elements and bloodshed. The film thus presents a contemporary narrative in which vampirism is mixed with Afro-American Christianity, while experimentally treading the line between reserved rigidity and immersive, experimentally impressive sequences. From today’s perspective, the story of the coming together of Dr. Hess Green and the elegant Ganja Meda, the wife of his former manic-depressive assistant who stabbed him with an ancient dagger and made him immortal and dependent on blood, is a refreshingly iconoclastic film about vampirism that rejects all of the senselessly appended canonical attributes and returns to the very essence of the genre – a treatise on the duality of the soul and body with bold themes of temptation, sexuality and the tragic curse of immortality. (05/05/2013)