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Men 1980, Bill Gunn, director of cult 70s horror Ganja & Hesstook this incredible low-budget video by Ishmael Reed. It is an elaborate melodrama in two parts about Black life in New York, made for television, and filmed on analog video. It’s hard and ready, and the sound mix is sometimes very muddy, but it comes out with energy and life.
The film has been expected for years around the world to shoot videos on mobile phones, although they may have had camera equipment the size of a wallet. Also, the opening credits of one episode are so important that they seem like a modern VHS-fetishist gag by someone like Harmony Korine. You can also compare the visuals and the over-the-top dialogue to Cassavetes or Altman. But for me, everything reminds me of Larry David Reduce Your Hassle; there is real humor in one scene where the hospital manager with a stern face in the emergency room is asking endless questions of questions filling the form of a young man who is in the throes of death, but cannot be cured until the offices are finished.
The story, though it develops in subplots and sidebars, revolves around a Harlem hospital nurse named Johnnie-Mae (played by non-professionals. Vertama Smart-Grosvenorpoet and food writer). In the opening scene, he is asked about his life and family and his interest in writing poetry; as such, she is calm, articulate and powerful in a way that she is not allowed to exist once the mainstream drama begins.
Johnnie-Mae is married to Charles, played by Walter Cotton, who produced the film, but is engaged to jazz musician Raymon (played by Sam Waymon, Nina Simone’s brother), which she reveals to two of her friends at a party. But the vain, mopey Charles – whose main interest seems to be watching the Guns of Navarone on TV – has a mind of his own, something revealed for a while that seems like someone’s dream. Johnnie-Mae is resentful of sharing her cramped marital home with her elderly father Charles, but she also has to let her evil brother Bubba and his girlfriend Mary-Alice stay in too; their criminal activities mean that they are arrested in the middle of the day when everyone else is out. Her relationship with Raymon is strained as she seems to be becoming more popular and successful, and in the second part of the film, her father-in-law’s weakness means a violent confrontation with Charles’ sister.
Where are you going? Anywhere and everywhere. It’s part of life. Two parts actually. The second half of the film retells what he did before the first one moved things along, which shows how it was made for TV, but Personal Problems doesn’t have the power of television storytelling or the narrative style of a movie. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour, endless experiment of experimental, pioneering art.
