Focusing on a theme of "Space and Place", the film this week includes: Space is the Place (John Corney, 1972).
Space Is the Place is an 85-minute 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 blaxsploitation and surrealist sci-fi, 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. He travels back in time to his past in a Chicago strip club, confronts a pimp-overlord, and plays a kind of tarot card roulette to decide the fate of the Black race. Traveling to present-day Oakland, Ra attempts to recruit young Blacks to move to his planet by setting up the Outer Space Employment Agency. When he’s kidnapped, community center kids save Sun Ra in time to play an epic concert. This time capsule of the early 1970s is a utopianist phantasm of space and place theory: as it is, as it was, and as it could be.
* * * * *
During the winter quarter, the Wednesday Night Cinema Society will present works which deal with the urban landscape, exploring themes related to urban spatialities, human geography, the commons, gentrification, and the temporalities of change. This quarter’s programming is curated by UC Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media PhD student Samuael Topiary, and draws from her ongoing academic research on landscape, environmental urbanism, the commons, and utopian imaginaries.
* * * * *
Free and open to the public
Parking $3 in Core West Parking Structure