GANJA AND HESS

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Virtual Film Category:Bijou Film Board
Series Info
Series:Bijou Film Forum
Film Info
Rating:R
Runtime:110 Minutes
Director:Bill Gunn
Year Released:1973
Production Country:USA
Language:English

Description

"Gunn uses an impressive and varied arsenal of techniques— straight documentary, high melodrama, dark ritual, and cool realism. He has sure control of all of them and they work together to reinforce each other." — James Monaco, Village Voice

"Hired to write a Blacula knock-off (with a drug-joke title), Gunn instead wrote a surreal love triangle among black sophisticates, devoid of sex machine phoniness, and directed it in a muttered, disorienting style, with a strange brew of Afro-Euro symbolism." Nick Pinkerton

Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and horror, Bill Gunn's revolutionary idependent film Ganja and Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) stars as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill Gunn), bestowing upon him the blessing of immortality... and the curse of an unquenchable thirst for blood.

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