The Radical Aesthetic of Ganja and Hess

The mesmerizing Ganja and Hess offers viewers a look at black life not often seen on film, and not often seen in the particular way that it is presented to us. The film has a dreamy aesthetic that feels radical in its refusal to cater to a white gaze. The film is indebted to the blaxploitation films that are its contemporaries, but cannot quite fit neatly into that genre, because it has its own counter-generic purposes. Harry Benshoff tells us in this week’s reading, “Indeed, many later critics championed this type of film style as neces- sary for overcoming the racist biases of Hollywood film form, much as 1970s femi- nist filmmakers called for the modification of Hollywood's visual pleasures and narrative style” (Benshoff, 43). The comparison between black and feminist filmmakers, Bill Gunn specifically, is an interesting one because both are very invested in the idea of the gaze as it relates to both the spectator and the camera eye and what we are meant to see with our own preconceived gaze. 

Ganja and Hess destroys any preconceived notion of what a mainstream audience thinks that black cinema is supposed to be, and that is part of its power. It uses techniques of repetitive shots, non-continuity editing, and jarring transitions to communicate a radical black aesthetic and a more specific interplay between African-Americans and black Africans, race and class, academic elitism and isolation with communal responsibility. This is communicated most effectively in the climactic church sequence, wherein professor/vampire Hess rejoins his community for about ten minutes to try to cure his vampirism through Christian worship and repentance, and promptly leaves when he feels that the job is done. It is hard to know what to make of this sequence, since his vampirism is brought on by an African supernatural curse, and is supposedly cured through the benevolence of the black church. 

It is not easy to know what to make of any of this, and if it was that would defeat the challenge and wonder of this film. That’s about all I have to say for now, but maybe I’ll update this blog post when more thoughts pop into my head.