The Urban Landscape - screening series

Space & Place

Space Is the Place is an Afrofuturist science fiction film featuring jazz legend and visionary mystic Sun Ra, co-written by Ra, filmed in 1972 and released in 1974. This wacky and wonderful combination of blaxspoitation and surrealist sci fi is intercut with concert footage of Sun Ra and his band, the Intergalactic Arkestra. The film tells the story of Sun Ra, who wants to settle a new planet for African Americans in outerspace, transporting them using the medium of music. Traveling back in time, to a Chicago strip club, he plays a kind of tarot card roulette to decide the fate of the Black race. Transported to present-day Oakland, Ra attempts to recruit young Blacks to move to his planet by setting up the Outer Space Employment Agency. When Sun Ra is kidnapped, the community center kids save him in time to play an epic concert. This time capsule of the early 1970s is a utopianist phantasm of space and place: as it is, as it was and as it could be.

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