Perhaps Space Is The Place

    Sun Ra's Space is the Place really does feel like the visual embodiment of his musical work, producing a film may not feel entirely coherent at any certain point, but as a whole, the point truly comes across. This film is more approachable than Ra's music he makes with his Arkestra, which is at many points experimental and grating, as many artists in the experimental jazz genre are to most people. Not to say people physically can't listen to his music, but most of his music does seem to have an acquired taste to it, which the movie doesn't really have. As a film, it does have a plot that can be followed fairly easily as well as a fairly straight forward message, though that message can be dissected further that it's presented at face value.

 

     Over the course of Ra's career, he became deeply obsessed with space which was fully represented in his music. Many of his albums and song names reflect this obsession; Ra himself even believed he was from Saturn and not from his true hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Ra takes his love for the power of music and his love of space, combining the two into one concept under the roof of Space is the Place. Ra takes the struggle of black existence in western society, deciding that in the state that this society is in and how far it has progressed, that society can't and could never truly allow for things to not be viewed through a racial lens. His solution is to move all black people of Earth to a new planet, doing so through the power of music. Ra tries to recruit the black people of Earth to his cause, thought he realizes the institutions of the U.S. are far too aggressive towards his recruitment and that Earth as a whole is on a doomed path, which leads him to leave with the few people that he had recruited, letting Earth follow its doomed path to the end.