Text by Carlos Valladares 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be separated).1 Today we have the proof in a body of work with which critics and public are still coming to grips: unpublished poems and short stories, novels, plays such as The Black Picture Show, an Emmy Award–winning teleplay, a subtly developed turn as the artist/husband in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 & 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]).”5 100
COSMIC FREEZE FRAMES: A POETICS OF BILL GUNN