Space Is the Place (1974)

 

100 Best Science Fiction Movies, Slant Magazine List

 

#72. Space Is the Place (1974)

 

“Afrofuturism” is one of those very useful words in Cultural Criticism that is a bit clumsy because it was coined in a singular work, sorta filled a gap, and its meaning kept expanding beyond its original intent.

 

Critic Mark Dery coined it for his article "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose" (1993) which celebrated forward-looking Artistic expressions by Afro-American Creators that were influenced by the cultural memory of the African diaspora. Though “Futurism” suggests SF, most Literary Practitioners seem more drawn to the genres of Fantasy and Magic Realism, and among the original interviewees, only one wrote narrative fiction, Delany, while Tate and Rose were a Musician and Professor of Africana Studies, respectively. Delany was far from the first Black Writer of SF, but the first who built his name as a member of the Genre way back in the 1960s. By the 1990s, he remained only one of one three major Genre names: Octavia Butler was even more representative of Afrofuturistic concerns than Delany, while Steven Barnes didn’t much address the Diaspora, at least at that point.

 

To complicate it more, Sub-Saharan SF Authors are now described as Afrofuturistic, but as they are still there, I suspect the Diaspora isn’t a primary concern to them. And how important is the Blackness of the Creator? Drake, who coined the term, is White, and the great Afrofuturist Comic-Book Super Hero, the Black Panther, was created by another White guy, Artist/Writer Jack Kirby (first appearance “Fantastic Four” July 1966).

 

Before the term was coined, the ideas infused music more than literature, and the single greatest pioneer was Jazz Composer, Musician, and Mystic, Sun Ra.

 

Born Herman Poole Blount, his musical career dated back to the 1940s, but his output became increasingly experimental in the 1960s. His productivity was extraordinary, and he style never ceased mutating, right up to his death in 1993 at the age 79. He displayed a fascination with a Mystical Egypt, Atlantis, encounters with Extraterrestrials, and various esoteric Religious Philosophies while pioneering the introduction of electronic instrumentation into Jazz. He and band Arkestra embraced a free-style was so increasingly distinctive it became known as a “Sun-Ra style” and those experimenting with the same musical themes were seen as much as his followers as they were their own innovators.

 

Ra embraced much of the same ideals of the Contactee movement, a largely White fringe UFO religion, and he consistently spoke of Music facilitating connection to a Cosmic Oneness, claiming he’d learned Spiritual Secrets after being transported to Saturn by benevolent Alien Secret Masters. Few doubt his literal belief in his highly-detailed personal Mythology which was consistent in his creative output and life-style for decades.

 

This film, a narrative feature meant to expiate his philosophies, is a mixture of clumsy amateurism and legitimate grandeur, executed on a minuscule budget. As its Director, John Coney, has only one other Directorial credit (a music video) and the movies execution is so wildly uneven from scene to scene, one is tempted to blame Coney for all its failings and credit Ra for all its charm.

 

This conclusion seems confirmed by Assistant Director Tom Bullock. The project started with an experimental series called “Dilexi” Produced Jim Newman, himself also a Musician and an Art Curator. Concert footage of Ra was expanded upon by Coney when he turned to his Cinematographer Seth Hill and Screenwriter Joshua Smith to create dramatic scenes that utilized Ra either minimally or not at all. These scenes leaned heavily on then-popular Blackploitation clichés, which fascinated Hill. Bullock described the result as "seemingly death-defying [in its] existential leaps in logic and continuity." It was then left to Editor Barbara Pokras to hammer some coherence into it during post-Production.

 

Ra, as the lead Actor, actually wasn’t much expected to act, he wrote his own dialogue and created a Narrator persona for himself, expounding on his wild ideas and demonstrating a quite distinctive word-play.

 

It was made in 1972, not released in 1974, barely in time because most of the film was set in the Future-year of 1976. The musical performances and the more exotic aspects of the Production design were clearly the work of Ra himself. The opening scene is the film’s best with Ra, attired in wild Pseudo-Egyptian regalia speaking with a mirror-faced Alien as they strolled through a garden on a Paradise Planet, "without the sound of anger, guns, or frustration." Colorful Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Flora and Fauna intermingle abound. For Ra, it represented a new home for the Black people of Earth.

 

So, he returns to Earth, Moses-like, to lead his people out of bondage, declaring himself “Ambassador from the Intergalactic Regions of the Council of Outer Space." He faces some ineffectual White Villains and a more impressive Black Satan Character, Overlord, played by Ray Johnson, whom apparently has been his nemesis across all of Time and Space. Overlord and Ra play a game of cards over the Black race's destiny.

 

Early on, most Blacks disbelieve, or as one uncredited Actress said: “How do we know you’re real?”

 

Ra: “How do you know I’m real? I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality. I come to you as the myth. That’s what black people are, myths. I came from a dream that the black men dreamed long ago. I’m a present sent to you by your ancestors. I’m going to be here until I pick certain ones of you to take with me.”

 

Same young woman: “What if we won’t come?”

 

“Then I’m going to have to do like they did in Africa: chain you up and take you with me.”

 

He sets up the Outer Space Employment Agency with the motto, "Eternally Open – Space is the Place"

 

Overlord eventually plays right into Ra’s hands, plotting to trick Ra into being accused of being a commercial sell-out, but only accomplishing getting his music greater radio play and promoting his concert. During the concert, Ra and his chosen colonists leave the Earth, which then explodes.

 

Ra is hugely appealing, so much so that one wishes to overlook the film’s undisguised anti-White Racism. Born of the far-end of Black Nationist ideals, the Utopian vision is Authoritarian (as demonstrated in the above quote regarding “chains”), strictly Segregationist, hostile to Miscegenation, and crass towards women. Most of the female characters are over-sexed White bimbos.

 

Much of this comes out of Ra’s own mouth, so he can’t be found blameless, but the film, which he had little control of during production, went farther than he wanted. He was so offended by the final product’s violent and sexual content, immediately demanding twenty-minutes be cut, making it too short for a conventional theatric release, though those minutes were later restored.

 

Two ironies in this are that during the films’ drawn-out post-Production, Ra, himself, was moving away from the Racialism in the philosophy he was expounding upon, and that outside the Cast and his Band, most-or-all of the other creative contributors to the film that was so hateful to White people were, themselves, White.

 

First scene and credits:

 

Sun Ra- Space is the Place (1974) trailer - YouTube