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Sun Ra - Space Is The Place
John Coney, 1974
82 minutes, 716021760 bytes
Nachfilm: The Otolith Group - Otolith
Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar, Richard Couzins
2003, 22 minutes
Sonntag, 10. Juli 2005, 21:00 Uhr
Pirate Cinema Berlin, Ziegelstrasse 20
S Oranienburger Strasse, U Oranienburger Tor
free entry
cheap drinks
bring a blank cd
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19:34:02 KODWO ESHUN
Yeah... the African-American Jazz composer Sun Ra who died in the mid-Nineties
and who used Jazz as a vehicle for a series of cosmologies. Cosmologies that
were worked out in his albums, in his stage performances and in his particular
attention to electronic technology. Sun Ra is especially famous for integrating
synthetic technologies, synthesizers, keyboards into Jazz music. At the same
time he is also important for introducing percussion, introducing extremely
complex, polyrhythmic structures into Jazz. So these two impulses, on the one
hand synthesizers and keyboards, and on the other hand polyrhythm and extreme
percussion, kind of polarized Jazz, totally changed the shape of it, made it
extremely complex music. And allowed it to become the vehicle for an extreme
cosmology which linked aspects of the past to aspects of the future. So on the
one hand you had the space race and you had the whole imagined solar systems of
planets, the planets Plutonia, Nubia. On the other hand you had a fascination
with the despotic system of Egypt and the Pharaos. And Sun Ra's key breakthrough
was to make these identifications, with Egypt from the past on the one hand and
space on the other hand... was to make Jazz a vehicle for moving in these two
directions at once. And he kept on reinventing these two directions. So you have
these four poles. You have percussion, you have synthesis, you have Egypt and
you have space. And these four poles can become the vehicles for a whole
cosmology which you can reinvent over time. And he did it from the Fifties to
the Nineties, over two hundred albums. And with his group of musicians, the
Arkestra, this group of twenty-one horn musicians... you can hear that the
Arkestra is a conjunction of the Arch and orchestra. So it's the idea that
listening to Sun Ra is boarding the Arkestra and going for a journey through the
sound worlds of his records with his Arkestra. The Arkestra is a vehicle, and
listening is an imaginative projection into the sound world of their records. So
you go with the Arkestra and you go for a journey through the cosmology of his
records. And this was Sun Ra's key idea, to conceptualize Jazz as a vehicle for
internal communication which then could add and take away aspects as you wanted.
You could add poetry, you could add philosophy, you could add song titles, as
Jazz became this system for a very complex idea of thinking.
19:36:56 KODWO ESHUN
Yeah... Sun Ra's Space Is The Place was a film made in 1974, made from a
particular album by Sun Ra. Sun Ra conducted at least three versions of Space Is
The Place as a particular, twenty minute form of music. And Space Is The Place
is a particular movie which joins Blaxploitation themes of the era. So that
would be, for instance, the emphasis on pimps, the emphasis on particular pimp
figures with fussy hats and sharp clothes and very stylish, but at the same time
quite predatory characteristics... with, again, a cosmological theme. So in
Space Is The Place you have a pimp character, but he's not exactly a pimp, he's
more like the devil, or the anti-christ, or the anti-principle. And this pimp
figure is playing with Sun Ra for the fate of the planet. And they play this
giant card game, and the winner of the card game holds the fate of the Earth in
his hands. So this cross-section, this transplanting of Blaxploitation themes
with cosmological themes, this is one of the main drives of Space Is The Place.
And the whole film goes through the... the impetus of it, goes through... it
narrativizes this cross-section, and then you see what happens. And it points
out that Sun Ra's project was world historical and gigantic and messianic. And
that Sun Ra at his time was, and still is, extremely experimental and advanced.
He always saw music as a vehicle that had huge implications. He always saw his
music as a point for exploration on the widest possible level. So he wanted to
reinvent history in the most radical way possible. And it's quite clear now, at
the end of this century, at the end of one century and the beginning of the
other, that Sun Ra is a major composer, a major Twentieth Century composer,
whose main themes and preoccupations have really barely been understood. There's
more than two hundred records to be listened to carefully and analyzed. And it's
clear that the Twenty-first Century will be studying Sun Ra much closer than the
Twentieth Century did.
19:39:27 KODWO ESHUN
The whole point of Sun Ra is that space, for Sun Ra, isn't a metaphor. It's a
transvaluation. It's the idea he uses to transvaluate African-American and
therefore American and therefore European history. It's not a metaphor for
escape. It's the turning point from which you can see that what you thought was
black history is white mythology. Therefore you can destroy black history,
therefore you can destroy white mythology, and you can put your own in its
place. So it's a very powerful idea, it's a transvaluated project. It's not a
metaphor or an analogy, it's the point of destruction and the point of
reconstruction.
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