Space Is the Place (1974) on Netflix
Sun Ra and his Arkestra land on a new planet and plan to settle African Americans there through music. In Oakland he recruits youths while a card game decides the race's fate.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.5/101,774 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes71%
Trailer
Plot summary
Sun Ra and his Arkestra, reported lost since a European tour in June 1969, land on a new planet and decide to settle African Americans there, using music as the means of travel. Ra goes back in time to the Chicago strip club where he once played piano as Sonny Ray in 1943 and confronts the Overseer, a pimp-overlord; the two settle the future of the Black race in a game of cards. In the early 1970s he arrives in Oakland, where he speaks to young African Americans at a youth center and opens an Outer Space Employment Agency for would-be settlers. Jimmy Fey, an employee of the Overseer, agrees to arrange radio interviews and a record for him, and a concert that will carry his message.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Space Is the Place (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Space Is the Place was built around concert footage of Sun Ra and His Arkestra: cinematographer Seth Hill was asked to invent a story tying the performances together and brought in film-school friend Joshua Smith, whose fascination with the culture of pimps and whores gave the film's non-Sun Ra scenes their blaxploitation themes.
- The complete film went unseen for decades: the only version in circulation was Sun Ra's own edit, abridged to 64 minutes and available on VHS, until the uncut 82-minute cut was released for the first time in 2003 by Plexifilm.
- Assistant director Tom Bullock said the film's fragmented production created "seemingly death-defying existential leaps in logic and continuity", which editor Barbara Pokras sorted out in post-production.
- Sun Ra taught a 1971 course called "The Black Man in the Cosmos" at the University of California, Berkeley, and producer Jim Newman's film Space Is the Place, starring Ra and his Arkestra, was based in part on those lectures.
