BOOK DATA Christopher Sieving, Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. $85.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper. 302 pages.In a 1989 Village Voice obituary for the writer, actor, and filmmaker Bill Gunn, the cultural critic Greg Tate both marked the importance of Gunn’s 1973 film Ganja & Hess and speculated about the potential of the films that Gunn never had the chance to make. “Imagine,” Tate wrote, “a world where Miles Davis was disallowed from recording after Kind of Blue or where Toni Morrison was only known as the author of The Bluest Eye. I don’t think, I know, that if Gunn had been making a film a year after Ganja and Hess our cinema would have been transformed as Miles and Morrison have transformed our music and literature” (5).Building on Tate’s tribute, Christopher Sieving’s fascinating and deeply researched new book, Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” meticulously chronicles Gunn’s cinematic work, examines its meaning, and imagines what more could have been if Gunn’s “endeavors in the movie industry” had not been “consistently devalued and thwarted by studios, producers, and critics” (4). In so doing, Sieving argues persuasively for both a broader recognition of Gunn’s prodigious talent and critical attention to the nuanced histories of Black filmmakers like Gunn and the “structural forces” of the film industry in which they worked and which they worked to change (5).As his title announces, Sieving focuses on Ganja & Hess, an avant-garde vampire film that blends multiple aesthetic and cultural contexts to depict black life beyond Hollywood stereotypes, mixing “storytelling characteristics from the European art cinema, plot conventions from the horror genre and vampire subgenre, and copious quantities of blood and nudity from the exploitation flick with an African American cast, iconography, and themes” (146). Since its release, Gunn’s film “has been ‘lost,’ recovered, preserved, recirculated, and reclaimed as one of the great works of African American cinema, independent cinema, and horror cinema” (190). As the first book-length study of Ganja & Hess, Sieving’s Pleading the Blood should be required reading for scholars in those various fields.But despite its title’s focus on Ganja & Hess, Sieving’s book is much more than a single-film study. It is the most comprehensive account to date of Gunn, a Black queer artist who, “in nearly every aspect of his existence,” Sieving writes, “breached borders and upset hierarchies” (34). It is also, by situating Gunn richly within his time and amid his colleagues and collaborators, a significant study of the wider efforts, successes, and failures of the many individuals—filmmakers, producers, critics, and others—who endeavored to build a new black film culture in the seventies and eighties. It is a model, too, of the methodological pluralism, from archival research to personal interviews to speculative readings, that is necessary to compose histories of filmmakers “whose careers were truncated, impeded, or sabotaged” by socioeconomic and ideological forces “outside their control” (5), a category of filmmakers that unfortunately includes a disproportionate number of women and artists of color. And it is proof, if any were needed, that accessible, engaging, and eminently teachable prose is a compelling vehicle for scholarship.Across five main chapters, illustrated with both screenshots and archival materials, Sieving shows how Gunn pushed the boundaries of what moving images could do. Gunn worked constantly, across mediums and genres, to change American cinema—from his 1970 directorial debut, the experimental erotic thriller Stop (which was judged too provocative by the studio and shelved) to his meta-artistic postmodern novels that reflected on his abandoned film projects, to Ganja & Hess, which brought together such a diverse array of intertexts and so exceeded the rubric of 1970s blaxploitation that it was pulled from theaters after only two weeks and recut to be rereleased as more marketable fare under the title Blood Couple. Much of Gunn’s work, however—plays, novels, screenplays, film treatments—remains unproduced, unpublished, or difficult to access. And there was certainly much more that Gunn wanted to do. “What other choice,” Tate queried, “would a darkly brilliant Afrocentric gay aesthete empowered by the Hollywood director’s chair have but to take all of us way, way, way the fuck on out?” (226).After a brief introduction, Sieving’s first chapter contextualizes Ganja & Hess within the 1970s boom in black film, which saw both the emergence of blaxploitation and the rise of black independent cinema. The period, Sieving writes, broadly reflected “a growing awareness of the need for Black control over their own images, a need that went far beyond the token employment of an African American screenwriter or director” (11). Sieving tells that larger story through Kelly-Jordan Enterprises, the production company behind Ganja & Hess, which endeavored to forge a commercially successful black art cinema. Producer Jack Jordan recruited African American authors like Maya Angelou and James Baldwin to make films for Kelly-Jordan, and he also took to the pages of Variety, decades before #OscarsSoWhite, to advocate for an Academy Awards equivalent for black film. Unfortunately, neither a Black Oscars nor many of the planned Kelly-Jordan films came to fruition—but Ganja & Hess did.After Sieving sets this production context, his next chapter turns to Gunn’s artistic trajectory. Gunn worked as an actor: his public resistance to one-dimensional roles earned him a reputation for “being difficult” (34). He also worked as a screenwriter, writing, among other projects, the script for Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970), adapted from Kristin Hunter’s novel of the same name. As a novelist himself, Gunn lamented that “all the beautiful description is in the script, and no one sees that” (50). Thematically, Sieving argues, Gunn’s writing for page, stage, and screen demonstrates a “creative repurposing of material from his own life in his art and his facility for imagining and inhabiting characters—women, the elderly, heterosexual couples, and whites and other ethnicities—with supposedly little relevance to his personal identity and experience” (34).Sieving’s third chapter, the heart of the book, is a “viewer’s guide” to Ganja & Hess. In a collaborative, historicist approach to close reading, Sieving combines his own analysis of the film’s form with behind-the-scenes accounts from Gunn’s key collaborators, including his life partner, musician Sam Waymon. This approach reveals, among other things, how Roy DeCarava’s photographs inspired cinematographer James Hinton’s lighting of Black bodies; the metaphorical import of a solar eclipse, serendipitously captured on film; and Gunn’s surprising proclivity, given his screenwriting background, to abandon his script and invite improvisation from his actors along with visual imagery that complicated rather than elucidated the narrative as written. Ganja & Hess requires some interpretive work on the part of viewers, but Gunn’s use of abstraction and ambiguity is ultimately what defines the film.Sieving’s final three chapters focus on the critical reception, distribution history, and recovery of Ganja & Hess. The film’s initial reception was divided: in the United States, hostile reviews from white film critics combined with a mismanaged marketing campaign to curtail ticket sales, even as Gunn was being feted in France, where Ganja & Hess was the only US film selected for Critics Week at Cannes. The film was ultimately recut as a more conventional horror flick, with Gunn insisting that his name be taken off, though Sieving reveals that, ironically, this recut preserved outtakes that otherwise would have been lost. In a drastic action, the studio also ordered Gunn’s cut destroyed, but a few prints survived, including one that was deposited at the Museum of Modern Art and became so popular that by the early eighties, it was showing significant wear. In collaboration with the film curator Pearl Bowser, Gunn booked a series of public appearances to raise money for a restoration. Yet even as there was a “steady acceleration of interest in Ganja & Hess,” Sieving writes, “Gunn’s post–Ganja & Hess career” was frustrated, as studios refused to fund his films (191). Gunn did, though, pursue important late-career collaborations, including his performance in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982) and Gunn’s own final directorial project, Personal Problems (1980), a three-hour meta–soap opera conceptualized by Ishmael Reed.In the years since Ganja & Hess, a host of Black filmmakers, including Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, and Spike Lee, have drawn inspiration from Gunn’s work. Sieving’s book should convince scholars, too, that it is impossible to think about US film history in general, and African American film history in particular, without accounting for Bill Gunn.