Corrupted Affections
You are the despised of the Earth; That is as if you were Water in the Desert. To be adored on this planet is to be a symbol of Success, And you must not succeed on any terms, because Life is endless.
—Ganja & Hess
The cult of the auteur has been the law of the land for so long that cinephilia can become a way of magical thinking, turning painful creative compromises into evidence of an overarching aim that may not have actually existed, finding in every twist of a director’s career proof for some master narrative. It’s thus that Kino Lorber’s rereleases of (1973) and (1980), both directed by the late African-American playwright and filmmaker Bill Gunn, pose an intriguing problem. Even if you want future canon-builders to rank Gunn alongside contemporaries like William Greaves and Gordon Parks, Sr. (who are themselves famous only for a fraction of their overall output), he has just three directorial credits to his name, and the first, (1970), is still languishing in a vault somewhere at Warner Bros., known only to private collectors and the handful of Brooklynites treated to a VHS screening back in 2010. (In his obituary of Gunn, who died in 1989 of encephalitis brought about by AIDS, the great critic Greg Tate wrote that “the attempt to bury, these essential rereleases corroborate that the serpentine path of Gunn’s career doubles as an indictment of the motion-picture business during his life and times.
