Personal Problems review – an exhilarating lo-fi epic of Black working-class life in 80s New York

The director of Ganja & Hess, Bill Gunn, turns analogue video and improvisation into a work of startling intimacy, humour and emotional force

In 1980, Bill Gunn, director of cult 70s horror Ganja & Hess, took on this quietly amazing micro-budget video project with author Ishmael Reed. It is an improvised melodrama in two parts about Black lives in New York, originally intended for television, and shot on analogue video. It is rough and ready, and the sound mix is sometimes very muddy indeed, but it pops with energy and life.

The film anticipates by decades the world of shooting movies on smartphones, even though they were presumably wielding camera equipment the size of a briefcase. Moreover, the opening titles to part one are so basic that they look like a modern intentionally VHS-fetishist gag by someone like Harmony Korine. You could also compare the boozy scenes and overlapping dialogue to Cassavetes or Altman. But for me, it all recalls Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm; there is genuine comedy in one scene in which a stern-faced hospital administrator in the emergency room asks an endless series of form-filling questions of a young man who has arrived in mortal agony, but can’t be treated until the bureaucracy is complete.
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