There are times when the white critic must sit down and listen. If he cannot listen and learn, then he must not concern himself with black creativity. 

—Bill Gunn, “To Be a Black Artist,” 1973

I think our artists have got to stop being so damned clear. But “clear” is not the word; it’s unjust to destroy “clear”: clear is good. “Flat” is what I’m trying to say. I want hallways, crevices, ditches, hills, and valleys. So I don’t expect you to go and understand it instantly. Just let yourself be taken on this artist’s trip. They’ll take you all sorts of places. 

—Bill Gunn, interviewed by Clyde Taylor, 1982

The world still hasn’t caught up with Bill Gunn. Throughout his life (1934–1989), he railed against and within institutions that rarely accorded him the respect or the space needed by this searing, maximalist visionary. But he never ceased to strive. Gunn built networks of solidarity, political and artistic (the two can never be separated).¹ Today we have the proof in a body of work with which critics and public are still coming to grips: unpublished poems and short stories, novels, plays such as The Black Picture Show, an Emmy Award–winning teleplay, a subtly developed turn as the artist/husband in Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film Losing Ground, the scripts for two of the most audacious Hollywood films ever greenlit (The Angel Levine and The Landlord, both 1970), and three self-directed masterpieces (the never released Stop!, 1970, the classic Ganja & Hess, 1973, and the mammoth Personal Problems, 1980), toward which these notes on a Gunn poetics are aimed.²

Before continuing, we must reckon with that beastly process known as canonization. We must come to terms with the unseen violence of the process of posthumous recognition, especially as it pertains to women, nonbinary people, and artists of color. Although certain key allies, collaborators, and friends of Gunn are still alive to see the larger, too-belated recognition of his genius (runs in repertory cinemas, shiny home-video releases, lauds in major newspapers and magazines), Gunn himself is not. He died in 1989, at the age of fifty-four, of encephalitis and aids-related complications in a hospital in Nyack, New York, the day before his play The Forbidden City opened at the Public Theater in New York City.³ He lived to see neither the acclaimed restorations of his work nor the audiences flocking to see Collins’s Losing Ground, not to mention his own Ganja & Hess and his and Ishmael Reed’s Personal Problems (restored through the joint efforts of Jake Perlin and Kino Lorber).⁴ Nicholas Forster, a lecturer in African American and Film and Media Studies at Yale University, is currently writing a biography of Gunn. For all these milestones (pluses for us now), we must never forget that racist establishment types stonewalled Gunn throughout his entire life, and that he did not live to flourish in the current culture, which fetes him both for better (the restorations of his work) and for worse (a feckless push for diversity that neoliberally acknowledges his existence at the expense of serious engagement with his work). On October 27, 2020, Ephraim Asili—the director of one of the best films of 2020, The Inheritance—posted on Instagram that he was listening to Carman Moore’s soundtrack LP of Personal Problems: “So glad that Bill Gunns soundtracks are finally getting pressed to vinyl and that his films are getting way overdue recognition (they love it when we die first [Black man shrugging emoji]).”⁵

What happens when words like “rediscovered” are unhesitatingly applied to the work of Gunn, who was never gone to those who knew or saw or were there since day one? Where is the place of the Black artist who lives for the art of film but gets no love back from the cultural and industry gatekeepers who own the means of motion-picture production?⁶

It’s with these questions in mind that I use the fragment to absorb, breathe, glide across and within Gunn’s work. Why the fragment? In part, it’s due to a necessary push against grand narratives or moral meanings—against totalizing, against seeing one’s self mirrored and being content with the surface, against learning about where Gunn came from and whom he desired as a key to unlock the work. Such methods only serve to comfort the viewer with a false sense of wisdom, appeasing her desire to use the artist to “solve” the work. By contrast, the fragmentary look—which we can also call a poetic turn—evades such bland approaches to the work. Gunn himself: “Even though [what I do] is political I would like for it to be looked at as a true poem about me.”⁷ I am guided by Alexander G. Weheliye’s Black feminist complication of our understanding of race’s central role in “bare life” through his idea of “habeas viscus,” which “insists on the importance of minuscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of human life.”⁸ These scraps and shivers of life can, indeed must, be gleaned within such dehumanizing spaces as the plantation, the ghetto, the camp. The cancellations that take place in such spaces are extended, as Gunn soon understood in the 1950s, into the Hollywood movie industry, where images of a knotty Black subjectivity are policed, watered down, or outright denied.

In the world of film, I can think of no other work that pays closer, more careful attention to Weheliye’s glimmers than Personal Problems—shot for shot, a masterpiece of dazzling proportions. As I’ve written before, this 165-minute, two-part film was originally broadcast as a late-night program on WNYC in New York and KQED in San Francisco, then requisitioned and rejected by PBS.⁹ Reed, its cowriter and executive producer, was hardly fazed: “We knew that we’d made a mark when, after a showing on WNYC TV, Vertamae Grosvenor boarded a bus and the driver greeted her by her character’s name, Johnnie Mae.”¹⁰ The film, which has sometimes been referred to as a “Black meta soap opera,” is a collaboration among a host of beautiful Black minds: the director Gunn, the writer Reed, the poet/producer Steve Cannon, and a cross-generational cast with deep roots in Black film history (headlined by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor).¹¹ Scenes are glimpsed in the life of Johnnie Mae (Smart-Grosvenor), a weary Harlem Hospital nurse who’s sick and tired of her long shifts, her cheating husband, her infrequent lover, her father-in-law, and the freeloading brother who crashes at her place in order to avoid a jail charge. Finding love in the city while bearing the omnipresent load of US racism, trying to ease the bitter tensions that divide precariously middle-class families over generations—seldom have such themes been lent so cool yet sweeping a treatment as in Personal Problems. It’s a work lined with fragments as diverse as daytime soap opera, New Orleans jazz, race films, Chicago blues, and the cathartic, funereal rawness of John Cassavetes (Husbands, 1970; Love Streams, 1984), individual shards that must be both dwelled in and read shot by shot—as in a poem where you may dwell upon one unstable word or rush madly across entire fields of action.

One such fragment: the performance of “Down on Me” for Johnnie Mae by her lover, the pianist Raymon (Sam Waymon, who wrote the song as well as performing it).¹² Even as Raymon sits down, her hands prop up his back, as if to massage the voice radiating these tender notes. The Sony video camera eerily slows down the movement of her head as she bobs it to the side and weeps silently with Waymon’s divine delivery. As a result, we can see the traces of where she was before she moved, and of where she’s going after she’s already started to move. “Come crashing down,” he sings, “come crashing down.” For me, it’s the definitive filmic scene when you want to know what it’s like to be surgingly overcome with emotion in real time. For Gunn as for the Cassavetes of Love Streams, the only thing interesting is love, its irresistible call.

The loveliest touch in the scene, its button, is the length of a muscle spasm. It occurs when Waymon sustains the “me” in “down on me” for ages; all we see is Smart-Grosvenor’s face as she waits, along with us, for the natural end of the note. But it keeps going. And going. And still going. Once it does end, Waymon garnishes the note with a subtle melisma. At that, her eyebrow raises in surprise. In that one involuntary twitch, her body acts out the poetry she recited to Waymon a few scenes earlier: “They say if you are a true believer—that is, if the faith runs river deep in your heart—it’s possible, in the instant before the yucca-colored night gives way to dawn, to witness a cosmic freeze-frame.” In one twitch, Smart-Grosvenor avoids the “loss of the human” that occurs when somebody is “captured” by the too-perfect, too-neat image, instead existing in a choppy film flow.¹³ We can pause that twitch with a DVD player, rewind it and live it again and again, yet it will always escape the paltry explanations we fling at it.

It would be remiss to call what Gunn films “reality,” passive and generic. Reality in Gunn is not the mythic filming of life as capital-L “Life” lusted after by André Bazin—some kind of objective truth of cinema, the trace made into a monument of itself. Rather, the truth seen by Gunn and company appears to its audience in blips: precious as pearl daggers, or as the chipped ebony keys on which “sepia sambas” are composed.¹⁴ The fragments—the eyebrow twitch, a champagne glass at brunch lifted to underline a bit of gossip—cannot be assimilated into a straight plot, yet they are painstakingly toiled over. The fragments record skins and shades that weren’t envisioned as worth noticing with any delicacy by the makers of the Hollywood camera apparatus (Gunn: “We’re photographed like the side of a fence—we’re photographed so hard”).¹⁵ Twenty-nine-year-old white cinematographer Robert Polidori wields the camera with the intent of twisting the glamour apparatus against its racist origins.¹⁶ Polidori and Gunn reject a top-down approach to cinematic-image construction, following wherever the actors want to take the piece. As Polidori told Reed,

The way Hollywood works, they don’t like improvisations. They want the movie to follow a map. They get everything preplanned and precut so they can shoot with one kind of camera. You’re not jamming anymore. You’re playing the preset song, so the actors don’t get to take off. They have to mimic, so it’s robotic. But I was filming Personal Problems like improvisational jazz.¹⁷

Such a highly unorthodox method of filming bolsters (what else?) poetry, that incommunicable domain of the quotidian that swerves to avoid crashing into institutions of power and fixed meaning. Recall the shot in Personal Problems when Gunn pans down to Waymon’s shiny black spats tapping out the pulse to his “One to One.” A crazy, inspired pan! All the singer’s sighs, all the love of the sight of blue lilies, all the lusciousness and the longing for Johnnie Mae that fills Raymon’s stage on this night (for only a night?), all the Black voices building toward the climax together: they all crystallize into this one shot, the feet that scaffold and feed a roomful of crying faces.¹⁸ The shot cuts to the heart of the film’s notion of a human as unrepresentable yet defiantly present; in a state of restless, blurry forming; engaged in a film act rather than ending as a filmed thing.¹⁹

Such ontologies of process go beyond the concept of the totalized Man in art, that imaginary figure toward whom all creation tends, lazily, to be pitched. The struggle Gunn faced to communicate his Black aesthete’s vision of the world was one in which he tried neither to placate the white establishment’s notion of universality nor to buy into an African-American establishment notion of what Sylvia Wynter calls an “ethno-aesthetics,” a reinforcing of the cultural Imaginary (a white-inclined separatism, binary prone, and uninterested in mélange, the poetics of relation, or frisson and fracture).Where is the place of pleasure, of the unrationalizable punctums of life? Gunn had been intrigued by such excess since childhood. He loved Oscar Wilde, man of the epigram, and Alexander the Great spoke to him more than such staid historical figures as George Washington Carver: “Not only did they say that [what Alexander the Great did] was real, but it was fantastical too.”²⁰ It’s not a big leap to connect Gunn’s acceptance of childhood phantasy to his adult hatred of an essentialized Man who denies that very same phantasy, the Black Man or Woman artist who must “speak to their race,” who must engage “the race question” and thus is refused the right to obfuscation. Gunn and company instead are invested in sonic textures, shattered scenes, errant colors, poetry, what the autonomist philosopher Franco Berardi calls “the excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: desire.”²¹

Ganja & Hess and Stop! queer and trouble desire, returning it to the quarrelsome erotic sketched out by figures such as Audre Lorde and Jean Cocteau. It happens, again, through the fragment: the ring-finger glinting on Ganja’s toe as she gives in to the death drive, a glacial, bewitching shot that adds yet another dimension to a body falsely presumed to be understood. Or the moment when the blood-addicted anthropologist Hess (Duane Jones) squeezes a cherry open and the widow Ganja (Marlene Clark) dips her red fingernail into the vampiric ooze, sucking the nail, licking the lip, baring her sharp canines. What clinches the scene is the glockenspiel of the film’s main theme, “You’ve Got to Learn to Let It Go,” a demented lullaby sound like the la-la’s in Krzysztof Komeda’s score to Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Here Gunn takes us into the realm of the erotic, whose most precise definition comes to us from Lorde, cited by Marlo D. David in her wonderful explication of desire in Gunn’s Stop! and Ganja & Hess: “The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”²² Where begins the ego, where the void? Partial answer: in between both gulfs, in a terrifying nowhere land where the rules of signification break down.

This is what guides Gunn. He can never take an assignment at face value. Given the signifier of vampirism (= Blacula, = cheap blaxploitation hit that bolsters the Hollywood regime, = business as usual), he breaks the contract that would only hire him out as a rhinestone sharecropper to unseen masters of mediocrity. It is the ultimate act of eroticization. As if playing with a Russian doll, he unnests the metaphors folded into vampirism: addiction to one’s own blood, addiction to capital, addiction to sex. Each is given a galaxy of moments, places, sensations: the Black church where a preacher’s hand against an addict’s forehead is the pathway toward a long-needed reckoning between body and soul; the coagulated blood pooling onto white tiles from a suicided Black assistant’s neck, lapped up by Hess as if parched at the end of a long exodus—only to start his longer death march into insanity.

What lingers in Stop!, a neo–Pier Paolo Pasolini psychosexual thriller on the basic mistrust that forms any one-to-one human equation (what Gunn films barely counts as “relation”-ships), is Gunn’s wild approach to space. Rooms are claustrophobic, bulging; the white lovers walk in and out of sight in ugly wide-angle views, while plan-séquences of their fights stretch on for merciless minutes without a cut. Gunn nails the irritable, lost quality of the main toxic relationship, its endlessness, which becomes the allegorical starting-point for the film’s journey: two straight white squares are set loose in Puerto Rico, meet a mixed Black/Puerto Rican swinger couple (the better half is Marlene Clark), and lose all sense of patriarchal ego in drug-fueled orgies that make Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice look like Full House. Outrageously, this movie has never been officially released. This major achievement of 1960s studio filmmaking has not been given the light of day by Warner Bros. Studios, despite the large following Gunn has commanded over the years. Waymon believes that an original print of Stop! is stored in the Warner Bros. archives, and a good print of the film played in 1989 at a posthumous retrospective of Gunn’s work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Perhaps readers might help in contacting Warner Bros. and asking them to release Stop! from the jail of obscurity in which this frightening, dense, sexy film has wallowed for now more than fifty years.²³

The longtime disrespect accorded Gunn’s legacy is not simply a matter of distribution. When Personal Problems was rereleased in 2018, the New York Times naturally decided to review it for the first time. It was a Critics’ Pick. It was lauded for its “vitality” and “integrity” (despite “all its rough edges”—words to unpack). But out of this curiously distant appraisal, a telltale line slipped through: “Personal Problems contains not a single shot that can be called beautiful.”²⁴ One would laugh if one were not so horrified by the casual racism here, masked under an identity-based appreciation begrudgingly, correctly doled out. By whose standards is it not beautiful? Whose beauty is even under consideration? What’s the standard: Quentin Tarantino? Marriage Story (2019)? For all my contempt for such a line, I refuse the balm of surprise. After all, it was in the Times that Gunn himself had to read a review of Ganja & Hess in which the reviewer left twenty minutes after the film started because he couldn’t understand what was happening, then decided to publish a full review anyway. In response, Gunn wrote “To Be a Black Artist,” an excoriating cri de coeur published in the Times as a letter to the editor that still speaks to us today. Gunn takes the paper and other like-minded publications to task for unchecked racist standards: “Another critic wondered where was the race problem. If he looks closely, he will find it in his own review.”²⁵ Through language, Gunn’s lifelong medium, he exposes the annihilations and dehumanizations wielded by a petty-minded, misogynist critical establishment: “When I first came into the ‘theatre,’ black women who were actresses were referred to as ‘great gals’ by white directors and critics. Marlene Clark, one of the most beautiful women and actresses I have ever known, was referred to as a ‘brownskinned looker’ (New York Post). That kind of disrespect could not have been cultivated in 110 minutes. It must have taken at least a good 250 years.”²⁶ So when I read a regular Times reviewer in 2018 still finding himself falling into the easy traps of the racist unconscious of US culture, we can only say that such disrespect extends a good 400 years more. It’s the kind of slip explained best by Diana Sands’s unforgettable line in Gunn’s Landlord script. When asked what she plans to do with her mixed-race son (the father is Beau Bridges), Sands gives voice to the fury of Bill Gunn: “I want him to be adopted white so he can grow up casual. Like his daddy.”

Why Gunn now? What do these ghostly video images of Black love, these grainy bootlegs of ’60s orgies, tell us about where we are going in the realms of love, politics, and art in these times of pandemic, acceleration, depression, state violence? In his seminal book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012), Berardi provides the start of an answer: “Since the 1980s, precarity has provoked a process of desolidarization and disaggregation of the social composition of work. Virtualization has been a complementary cause of desolidarization: precarization makes the social body frail at the level of work, while virtualization makes the social body frail at the level of affection.”²⁷ Gunn’s films—whether he is in front of or behind the camera—restore the passion of the body tenfold. Bill Gunn, Black artist, transforms the symbols and the language that spurn us into action. It is the individual’s choice to listen. Whatever she does, with or without her, Gunn’s poetry continues to slide on, soaking in blue lilies and wet cherries, rambling ever forward.