Weirdhouse Cinema: Space Is the Place

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1974 Afrofuturist science fiction film "Space Is the Place," featuring the enigmatic Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
In today's episode, We're going to cover a unique film
that I've wanted to cover for a long time here
on the show. It's nineteen seventy four Space is the Place,
starring and built around the visionary, experimental jazz composer and
band leader Son Raw. There's nothing else out there quite
like it, just like there has never been anyone else
quite like Sun Raw. So I'm really looking forward to

(00:40):
discussing this one. Joe, had you seen the movie before?

Speaker 3 (00:44):
No, I had never seen the movie before, And what
a treat. I loved it. I thought this was great.
It's totally unique. I've never seen a movie like this.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah. Yeah, it is quite a treat. In its best moments,
I think Space is the Place delivers the kind of
avant garde surrealism that you would find in certainly nineteen
seventies cinema such as Jo Darowski's Holy Mountain, while also
channeling various works of contemporary and classic science fiction. Certainly

(01:13):
early scenes also bring to mind seventy two silent running,
you know, where we have these sort of artificial forests
or some sort of an alien landscape that we're visiting.
And of course all these examples speak to something about
the nineteen seventies and often something to do with dislocation
in the early nineteen seventies. Meanwhile, there are other elements

(01:37):
again of spaces the place that harken to B movie
science fiction in the fifties and sixties, and all of
this while providing a platform for sun Raw to express
his own particular philosophy on personal identity, creative liberation, mythology,
and above all, the spiritual power of music. Speaking of music,

(01:57):
it is worth noting that this is, in a very
limited way, a concert film, or more to the point,
it's a project that kind of started out as an
attempt to do some sort of a concert film too.
I think the earliest idea was, let's get Sun Raw
and his orchestra inside a planetarium and they'll do a show.

(02:17):
There'll be lights, and we'll film it. That never came
to fruition, but that project idea ended up becoming Space
as the place. It ended up becoming a narrative film
that has sequences of actual solar orchestra performance, but also
has this narrative structure that in times also has elements

(02:42):
of say, black exploitation cinema of the seventies, but also
again keeps using these sci fi and surrealist elements as well.
So when this film is firing in all cylinders, it's
just absolutely mesmerizing, offering a sort of crystallization of some
of Sunraw's cosmic afro futurist ideas.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Yeah, there are a lot of parts of this movie
where soun Raw seems to I was gonna say, break character,
but I guess that's to the extent that he is
playing a character in the movie and is not just
speaking for himself. I do think there is some element
of performance, but also he is putting a lot of
his real self and his real thoughts into the movie

(03:24):
from what I can tell, But there is a lot
of Sunraw just speaking his ideas in some monologues that
occur within scenes or at least are intercut with scenes,
but feel almost just improvised. He's sort of like sharing
his thoughts or kind of commenting on the plot of
the movie, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah. Yeah, in the nature of these little monologues, they
feel again, they feel almost improved. Though. I'm to understand
Sonraw wrote all of his lines and actually, you know,
wrote them out before delivering them. But yeah, there's almost
kind of a documentarian feel to his presentation at times,

(04:07):
and then his whole character is bound up like in
this sense of, you know, a very wise figure, almost
kind of a Buddha like figure who is sharing wisdom
with you, but also laying out riddles and asking questions
of you and so forth in a very tantalizing way.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Now, there have been multiple books written about sun Raw,
and several of these seem very well regarded. I was
reading through Space is the Place, The Lives and Times
of Sun Raw by jazz historian John Zwed, in addition
to DVD extras on Space Is the Place and a
nineteen eighty musical documentary piece titled Sun Raw A Joyful Noise,

(04:48):
which you can find in various places. I watched that
one an Eternal Family, but I think you can also
find it like on YouTube.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but
you shared it with me. You shared the part where
Sunraw is warming and he's doing this thing on the
keyboard where he starts spinning around in circles and ultimentually
hitting the keyboard each time he revolves. Impressive.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, A Joyful Noise has some great sit downs bits
with Son Raw, and there's also bits where he's like
wandering around the ancient Egyptian segment of a museum, perhaps
in Philadelphia, I'm not sure where, you know, talking about
some of his concepts. But also some great performance footage,
including this scene where he's just tearing into the synthesizer.

(05:33):
Just passion on display there. But the book by Zwet
is quite good. He was born in thirty six. The
author actually saw Sun Raw in his orchestra play, and
as he points out in the book, like Raw. He
grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, later lived in Philadelphia like Raw.

(05:53):
So he was like, I was the ideal person to
write a book about him, while also acknowledging that this
was like the first biography that he wrote. Generally not
advisable to pick somebody who say denies having been born
or or is very cagey about various aspects of their
terrestrial biography. Yeah, but it's a great book, and I

(06:17):
wanted to share just a couple of excerpts from it.
Particularly there's a part where he's talking about what it
was like to go and see Sun Raw and his
band the Orchestra perform in the late sixties and early seventies,
you know, basically the time period around and just before
the release of this film.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
And just as a bit of context by there was
sort of an arc of Sunraw's career where earlier on, say,
in the forties and fifties, he was a more conventional
jazz musician. Maybe not totally conventional, I think, always sort
of you know, more innovative, but he was playing in
more familiar styles like maybe swing or I read that

(07:01):
maybe some of his stuff is considered hard bop.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
But yeah, hard bob b boban. I'm gonna have to admit,
as we discuss Son Raw and his music, I've never
been like a huge jazz person, so I'm going to
use some of the wrong terminology to describe jazz inevitably.
But yeah, he was, this is my understanding as well,
and more traditional, but then you know, really gets on
this space trip, you know, certainly by the late sixties,

(07:26):
early seventies.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. So in
the sixties is when the stuff it starts getting very
strange and going in much more experimental, avant guard directions,
and by the seventies is incorporating just lots of weirdness.
Is like famously weird at this point.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
And yeah, so the biographer here writes that, yeah, going
to one of these concerts could be mystifying and even scary.
Quote the exotic, the down home, eccentric, hip, archaic and
even and the freaky could come at the audience in
overlapping waves. He writes that are performed might begin in
total darkness, and then the lights would come up on

(08:03):
acrobats and dancers while the band chanted marched around and
various costumes you know that might reference both ancient Egypt
and also a kind of space age future. You'd have
saxophone players engaging in battles, musical battles. And then quote
there was also the maestro himself and his cockpit slash

(08:25):
pullpit playing an electric keyboard, his fingers sliding upside down
on the keys, sometimes with his butt. All of this
enacted in front of a silent movie of the band
capering among the pyramids of Egypt.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
That sounds pretty amazing. I wish I could have seen that.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, And to be clear, I'll come back to this
as well. But even though soun Raw has been gone
from the mortal realm for quite a while, the orchestra
is still around and still tours, so it is possible
for folks out there to catch them. More on that
in a bit, but any rate, so this was the
basic vibe of the show, and some music fans, critics,

(09:04):
and commentators loved all of this. Others distrusted it or
scoffed at it. You know, it wasn't universally loved, but
a lot of people were into it. But the band
was doing something very unique. They were creating excitement, generating
excitement about jazz, drawing in all these different jazz influences
while also exploring new ground. Son Raw was a pioneer
in the use of electric music in jazz, and he

(09:27):
was also of course a founding pioneer in afrofuturism itself.
So he's bringing in space age concepts, sci fi concepts,
esoteric concepts alongside Black egyptomania to generate his own personal
mythology and this unique take on afrofuturist philosophy.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, and a big part of This comes through in
the movie. It's one of the main themes of the
movie is something about a different form that black liberation
can take, So like black liberation being not just a
political project in this world, but kind, to some extent
expansion of consciousness and to some extent maybe a literal

(10:10):
transportation to a cosmic realm.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, this is one of
those things that I think it's difficult to codify exactly
what his philosophy was. I would say to really understand it,
you need to listen to his music and hear him talk,
and you know, hear the lectures that he gave. My
perhaps limited understanding of it is that basically the idea
is that human beings can only achieve a kind of

(10:34):
freedom and liberation via creative inward journey, with space being
the source of life and the infinite expanse of inner creativity,
mythology and personal identity. Earth, on the other hand, is
a doomed world, and our individual lives are much too
short and each of us much too powerless to ever
enact meaningful outward change. But on an individual inward facing level,

(10:59):
we can all grow ask what he referred to as
the altered destiny. Yeah, so it does seem to be
a recurring theme that, like when he's talking about space
and going into outer space, it's also talking about going
inward into the creative world.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah. That is an interesting point of interpretation where I
want to be careful not to go too far either
way to either over or underliteralize the extent to which
he's talking about really traveling into space, because to some
extent it seems like it's not just a metaphor for
like expansion of consciousness or transformation of the self into

(11:36):
a different kind of being. What I detect, you know,
and caveats for my own understanding, but what I detect
from the film and the stuff I've read is that
there is some amount of a metaphor at work there.
That it is about changing the self and turning inward
and expanding your own mind through creative expression and the

(11:57):
finding of inner piece and transformation. But there is also
some sort of externalization of this into ideas about transportation
into space and the creation of new types of science
and technology powered by this creative expression and by music.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely, Again, I think ultimately you have to
have to let Raw in his music and then this
film speak speak for itself. Yeah, I have a few
points here I want to cover from Sweed in that
biography that concerns specifically this film. He points out that,
you know, it originally originated as a as an attempt

(12:36):
to do some sort of a concert film at the
San Francisco Planetarium. He says that he does stress that
it would be a mistake to take the film too
literally as a reflection of Sunraw's ideas, but he does
point out, you know, Sunraw wrote his own lines, he
made suggestions during filming, but that it was ultimately collectively
written and considerably re edited. And he says, quote and

(13:00):
Son Raw, though he took directions well, kept leaving the
script behind or ignoring it. So you get the sense
from from various people involved that this was a film yeah,
that was kind of shot in in layers and then
reassembled and then reassembled again, and then there were thoughts
about you know, cutting stuff out, then the thoughts about

(13:21):
adding stuff back in. And it was apparently kind of
a frustration point for the director and the producers because
one of the things about Raw with his music is
like no piece was ever really completely finished. To a
certain extent, like you would always potentially play it again
and change something about it. You know. He had that
musician's approach to the content, whereas the filmmakers were like,

(13:45):
this needs to be done at some point, it has
to be finished so we can send it out. You know.
So there was you know, maybe you know, there were
differing philosophies on the creative process there. Yeah, but yeah.
Later on, raw Won wanted to cut the film down
to like sixty three minutes, and some of the cuts

(14:07):
that he wanted to take out, he wanted to take
out two sexual situations the pool hall scene that will
refer to in a bet. And he began to study
film himself and took to editing the film himself apparently,
but then increasingly thought, well everything should just be reshot.
We didn't get it the first time. He wanted to
be more beautiful, more spiritual, but then later on also

(14:29):
talked about, well maybe I want to put make sure
the street stuff, the pool hall scene, all this is
back in there for one reason or another. So the
movie here, it showed it. It showed just a couple
of times in San Francisco and New York when it
came out in What's seventy four, but then it largely vanished.
It kind of became not quite a lost film, but
very much an underground film for a while. And the

(14:53):
version that we watched the show, and the version that's
most commonly available out there, the eighty two minute cut,
this resurface, This came back out in two thousand and three,
and yeah, that's the version you're going to find in
most places.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Yeah, that's the version I saw. So that's the longer
version that has all the stuff in it. Yeah, but
some of the especially some of the earthly present scenes
where were cut out of Sunraw's initial edit.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, but then again it sounds like he had a
shorter edit. But it's not like he was like this
is my definitive cut, Like he kind of approached it
like perhaps like something that had not yet found its
ideal form.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
Well, I mean, yeah, that strikes me. The classic artists
move like you keep changing your mind about what would
be the best form of something.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, yeah, totally understandable. So elevator pitch for this film,
I came up with a couple of them. The Harrowing
of Earth by sun Raw there, that's kind of what's
going on as well as The Day the Earth Stood
Still jazz version.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
I think both of those work, yeah, because while it
is a tale of cosmic consciousness and liberation, and it
is also a tale of doom and salvation.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
All Right, Well, at this point, you're like, I need
to duck out. I need to watch this film in
its entirety and then come back or rewatch it, whatever
the case may be, or just make sure that you
can watch it later. Well. Space Is the Place is
currently available to stream in the US on both HBO
Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also find it
on DVD and a Blu ray is available via a

(16:24):
three LP box set from Sundays Music. For my own part,
I watched it a couple of times for this episode,
once on HBO Max and then another time on the
PLEXIFILM DVD, which I rented from Atlanta's own Video Drum.
It has a couple of extras on there. I mentioned
that that sometimes sun ron Is Orchestra would play the

(16:46):
Place sequences of band members in front of ancient Egyptian ruins.
They include that as bonus content on there. You can
actually watch that footage, and there's also an interview with
the producer and the director.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
By the way, if you hear us saying Sunra's orchestra,
it is spelled like it sounds the way we're saying
it there, So if you're looking it up, it's a
r k arch estra. And I believe that some amount
of allusion to the idea of a biblical arc is
some is somewhat intentional.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
I think so. Yeah. So Sunra's lingo is full of
various you know, unique takes on words, combinations of words
and terms. And as I'll mention again, he was a
voracious reader, read a lot of like esoteric content, alternative histories,
and also, especially earlier in his life, a lot of

(17:37):
like biblical material, so you know, it's very well acquainted
with with the Bible and interpretations of the Bible. And
then in his own reading, Yeah, this is this is fascinating.
Apparently he had, at least later in life, had his
own take on reading where he believed, or at least
he told people that the idea was that you had

(17:58):
all the knowledge that was in books already your head
and you were just unlocking them by reading books. And
therefore you could start reading a book at any point
and stop reading it at any point you're just kind
of like refreshing your brain with that content. And then
on top of that, he would tend to read like
any material as if it were like a careful analysis

(18:19):
of like biblical writings, and he would often hinge on
words that sound sounded similar, like orchestra orchestra, you know,
and combining things and so forth, so that there's a
lot of that in his in this film and just
in his language in general.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Yeah, I believe that there are also some kind of
Egyptian religious ideas Tupstra I think, you know, raw of course.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, yeah, but even things like altered destiny comes up,
which of course you get the sense of altered destiny,
but also an altar as in a like a place
where some sort of religious ritual takes place and so forth.
So they were more of that to discuss as we proceed.
But let's go ahead and get into the people behind
this film, starting with the director. It is John Coney,

(19:08):
who lived nineteen thirty five through twenty fifteen American director
who has the sole directorial credit on the film, and
outside of this film, Outside of Space is the Place,
he's also credited with directing Pink Floyd Kqed so kqed
IS was a San Francisco TV station and basically, you know,

(19:31):
around this time, late sixties, early seventies, I guess they
had a lot of access to and maybe sent up
kind of a mandate to film a lot of like
a lot of bands and a lot of musical acts,
including Pink Floyd. And so this was what Pink Floyd
kqed is slash was just a film studio performance with
I think some added like you know, light show, bells

(19:54):
and whistles. And of course this ties into the original
plan for Space is the place that it would be
some sort of a just a film performance in a
cool setting, and that of course morphed into this narrative film. Yeah,
and it's also stressed that like different people were brought
in at different times to add elements that would be
eventually stitched together into this mostly cohesive narrative form that

(20:18):
includes writer Joshua Smith, who will get to in a moment,
cinematographer Seth Hill, who was I should note a writer
and director on in search of with Leonard Nimoy, and
then all of this gets edited together by editor Barbara Pocras,
whose credits include Knight of the Cobra Woman, The Giant
Spider Invasion, Fade to Black Chud two, and the Return

(20:41):
of a Living Debt.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Chud to Bud the Chud exactly.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, oh boy. All right, so we've covered the director.
The producer on this was Jim Newman born nineteen thirty three.
This was the first of only three production credits that
he has from the seventies and eighties. Newman was himself
a jazz saxophonist and a multi instrumentalist who ultimately became

(21:08):
involved in a number of artistic interests, from music performance
to art gallery management. He will also worked with KQED
TV at the time on programs featuring a variety of musicians,
and it was roughly out of this work that the
idea emerged to do this Sunraw project. He went on
to co found the music festival organization and record label

(21:30):
Other Minds in I believe nineteen ninety one, and that
continues on to this day. The festival especially, I think
the next one is this October.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
Oh cool. Do you know what kind of acts they get?

Speaker 2 (21:41):
I was looking at it. I think it's a lot
of like jazz and jazz adjacent tie ACKs. But I
was not super familiar with it, so Bay Area music
fans and jazz enthusiasts write in and tell us about
it all right. The writer again, Joshua Smith, is the
credited writer, alongside Sonraw, who will get to in just
a second. Smith's only other writing credit was nineteen seventy

(22:05):
five Super Seal, a kid's movie about a seal that
is I guess super and its stars. One of the
stars is Sterling Holloway and it was directed by a
director by the name of Michael Duggan.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
So this is about a super seal as in a pinniped.
It's not about a super seal.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, not like a navy seal, like a straight up
animal seal. And I think it's sometimes. It was also
released under the title Captain Nemo. For some reason, I.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Wasn't even thinking navy seal. I was thinking, like, it
couldn't be about a gasket.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
It's not a gasket, it's not a soldier. It's just
a straight up seal.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, okay, but hey, we've been putting off. Okay, so
now we're going to get to the main, the main attraction.
What is this movie about. It's about Sun Raw.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
That's right, and Sunraw depends This is a difficult Does
Sunraw play himself? Does he play a fictional version of Sounraw?
This is I guess this is kind of an opening question.
It depends on how you want to approach it.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
This was one of my big questions about the movie too,
and this will come up again when we start talking
about parts of the plot.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah. But he also again is credited as writer. He
at least wrote all of his own lines, and he
is the composer. All of the music you hear in
this film is Son Raw.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
And his orchestra.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
So Sounrah lived nineteen fourteen through nineteen ninety three, one
of the most enigmatic performers of the twentieth century, regardless
of genre, and a highly influential figure in avant garde jazz.
As Zwed discusses in his book, Raw gave multiple and
sometimes contradictory origin stories about himself and his early history

(23:39):
as a human being, while also denying being born, denying
being a human, and dismissing any previous names that he
had as mere pseudonyms. So again, this is not one
of those cases where he was professionally known as Son Raw.
It seems to me like he was Son Raw I
mean that's the name he went by. People called him

(24:01):
son Raw or Sonny Raw or Sonny or Raw, and
it was either a persona that he deeply lived or
indeed simply who he was. Still we know he was
born Herman Sonny Blount in nineteen fourteen in Birmingham, Alabama,
and that he quickly proved himself a quite gifted and
unique individual. He was a voracious reader even at an

(24:23):
early age, a high achieving student, and something of a
musical prodigy. From a very early age he was reading
and composing sheet music, playing in adult bands, apparently coming
home from gigs with every last song memorized that they played.
Just had an amazing aptitude for music. He attended Alabama

(24:43):
Agricultural and Mechanical University, and he was considering further education
in music, teaching, and even the church, while also just
reading on a variety of topics, including commentaries and concordances
for the Bible. And it was during this time, this
would have been on nineteen thirty six when he was
I guess around twenty two, he had a visionary or

(25:04):
paranormal experience, or that those are the terms we would
use for it today, in which he felt himself experienced
himself transported in energy form to the planet Saturn by
other worldly entities that had antennas over their eyes and
ears that told him to decease teaching training because there
was going to be quote great trouble in schools and

(25:26):
that a time of chaos was coming and that he
would need to speak and the people would listen to him.
And this vision also included, like it's detailed in the biography,
like thousands of spaceships landing on Earth beneath a purple
and dark red sky.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Wow, that's interesting. I had read about his experience of
being transported bodily to Saturn, but I hadn't read this
detail about the spaceships descending on Earth beneath a purple
and red sky, which maybe I'm taking the implications of
that wrong with that sounds kind of ominous to me.
And usually though a lot in the movie Space Is

(26:04):
The Place is about the future doom of Earth, the
doom of Earth does not seem to come from external
cosmic sources. Really. It seems like that, you know, the
cosmos going outside beyond the Earth is like the good thing,
that's the salvation and the doom of the Earth is
somehow intrinsic to it.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, there's a bit in a Joyful Noise where he's
giving a a lecture where he's talking about how, like
all life everything comes from space, like space is the
source of everything that is vital, but then Earth produces
nothing but death. And I think his view is that, like,
it's the people on Earth are out of line with
the spirit and with their spiritual existence, and it's because

(26:48):
of these problems on Earth that we are kind of
like dooming ourselves. But this will be interesting to get
into when we discuss the plot of the movie as well. Yeah,
so I mentioned earlier that sun Raw would sometimes give
contradictory ideas about his past human life, but Zwed writes
that Sunraw, concerning the story of Saturn, quote told this

(27:11):
story many times, unembarrassed, ingenuously and with remarkable consistency of detail.
So you know, no matter how he would sort of
play with other stories, he basically told the same story
every time with this one. And he points out that
while in retrospect we might compare this to UFO abduction tales,

(27:31):
except with the aliens here being friendly, which isn't always
the case with alien aduction narratives obviously, but more to
the point, he points out this was many years before
the UFO abduction script really took off in the early
nineteen fifties. Now, it is also worth pointing out that
you can compare this story to various traditions of Christian

(27:51):
conversion experiences as well, and of course, broadly, you know
that is always the case. The paranormal experiences that involve UFO,
those are just you know, very much adjacent to stories
involving angels or spirits, these various visionary experiences people have
had throughout time for a variety of reasons. We've talked
about this on the show on Stuff to Will Your

(28:13):
Mind multiple times before.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Have we talked about how a lot of the UFO
lore is just is coming full circle to spiritual phenomena beliefs?
Oh yeah, that well, today, a lot of the people
who you know, twenty years ago they were really big
about UFO is like as aliens coming from space. Now
a lot of them have concluded that actually aliens are

(28:36):
angels or aliens are demons that like the same phenomena
they believed in exist, but now they are convinced it
is spiritual phenomena.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Oh, Wow, yeah, I mean it, I really have to
unpack what it says about us today as a civilization.
But it makes sense because again we're dealing with the
same meat with different dressing here, I think. Yeah, so
I'm providing the brief version here concerning son Raw. But
after this experience, the man who would become Sonny Raw

(29:09):
and finally Sun Raw began to devote himself to creating
music with a tightly selected group of spiritually like minded musicians.
What followed, most notably with the son Raw House in
Philadelphia was something sometimes described as a house of perpetual rehearsal.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
So just playing music constantly, yeah, just through yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
And you know, if you're like me and you don't
know a whole lot about jazz, you might you might
hear orchestra music or see performance footage and think, well,
this is is just kind of improvising. They're riffing, right,
But the orchestra music was the result of meticulous rehearsal.
That's one thing that all these different sources point out
is that like they were just always rehearsing when they film.

(29:52):
Space is the place, Like son Raw and his band
showed up and they were just ready to go. They
had everything, you know. You know, I don't know to
what degree there is still playing around and riffing and
so forth, but you know, it's still a lot of
work goes into creating what you see on the screen
and what you hear on these various audio releases.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Well, I don't know to what extent the sun Raw
Orchestra did involve improvisation. I mean, it looks to me
like at least some things are maybe some improvised solos,
maybe some of what Sunra himself is doing at least
like him when he's spinning around and stuff that it
seems like that would have to be somewhat improvised. But
one thing that I think is definitely true is that

(30:33):
it is hard to improvise effectively if you don't have
a well rehearsed skeleton to base the improvisation of, you know,
to have like a tight band that knows when the
changes are coming, knows how long to vamp, and has
a strong you know, has strong things going on in
a structural and rehearsed way. That sort of creates the
opportunity for a soloist to go on a big you know,

(30:55):
improvised festooning of those those strong bones underneath. So rehear
they're not mutually exclusive. Like you know, strong planning and
rehearsal gives rise to the opportunity for good improvisation.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
That's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah, And
so you know, you see, you hear people talk about,
you read about the Sunra House, and you see footage
of it. And basically this is a place where Sunrat
had his instruments and his various books were already touched
on some of the subjects he was into. And he
lived there along with the current orchestra members, and there

(31:30):
would also be a revolving assortment of guests as well.
But you had kind of like a communal living space,
almost like an asheram, except devoted to the pursuit of music.
Under Sunra's leadership, he might give you a new name,
or instruct you. Instruct you too for the first time
in your life, carve an ancient Egyptian infinity lightning and

(31:50):
thunder drum out of the stump of a tree that
had been struck by lightning across the street. That's detailed
and a joyful noise. And so like my musicians were
drawn to him like it was a you know, they
considered like an honor to be able to be there
and partake of this, to sort of engage in the
study of the deep cosmic background radiation of jazz wow.

(32:13):
And so the orchestra toured the US, toured around the world,
and when sun Raw passed in ninety three, leadership of
the band at least by ninety five, I believe passed
to orchestra member Marshall Allen, who is in this film,
and Marshall and the band continues to tour and as
of this recording June ninth, twenty twenty six, Marshall Allen

(32:34):
still leads the band and performs with them at the
age of one hundred and two. WHOA, yeah, very impressed.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's awesome. Yeah, okay, Well, so we know that Sunraw's
ideas are the core of the film's content. He's sort
of the star of the film, sort of playing a
character maybe, but also to a large extent, playing himself
and representing. But there are also characters in the movie
that are fully just fictional characters, right, and they might

(33:05):
sort of represent ideas within Sunraw's philosophy or theology. But
one of these major characters in the movie is called
the Overseer sort of a primary villain, a kind of
Satanic figure in a way, though I don't want to
overseell that connection because I don't think you can just
straightforwardly say he is the devil. That's too simple.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, yeah, he's There are shades of Satan to him,
for sure, But yeah, he is this clearly supernatural manipulator
type character that is all about the manipulation and in
the corruption of human beings.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, and he likes people to meet their bad destiny.
I've got more detail about that later on, But there's
sort of different ideas about how sun Raw versus the
Overseer influence people with respect to destiny, at least as
far as I could tell from the storytelling.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, yeah, and I should also exploitation is also a
major theme of this character. So The Overseer is played
by Raymond Johnson who lived nineteen thirty one through twenty
twenty one. He's great in this role. He really really
digs into it, has a nice evil laugh that he
gets to belt out quite a lot. He previously appeared

(34:21):
in an uncredited role in seventy one's Dirty Harry, and
afterwards appeared as Ray Johnson in the seventy six Rudy
Ray Moore Picture of the Human Tornado. His later credits
include a nineteen eighty eight TV adaptation of The Bourne Identity,
so he has a lot of screen time. He's pretty great.
Another major character, and this is the first human character

(34:45):
we're going to discuss here, because so far, like sun
Raw is some sort of cosmic being, and then likewise
the Overseer is some sort of non human being. But
then the character Jimmy Fay is just a mortal man
trying to make his way in the world in early
nineteen seventies what Oakland, and he is played by Christopher Brooks.

(35:08):
I couldn't find any dates on him or what his
age is, but he's an actor whose other credits include
seventy one's roseland seventy three's Alabama's Ghosts, seventy threes, Magnum Force,
and seventy threes The God Monster of Indian Flats, as
well as seventy six. Is almost a man all right.
A few other characters, a few other actors of note here.

(35:31):
A number of cast members in this were in nothing else.
This was, for the most part, I think a scrappy,
lower budget affair, and so there are various folks that
just have this as their sole credit. But we have
a character. This is another one of the mortal characters
in the show. Character Bubbles is played by Jack Baker,
who lived nineteen forty seven through nineteen ninety four. Mainstream

(35:53):
American actor throughout the seventies, with appearances on such TV
shows as Mission Impossible, Good Times, One Bug, and The
Croft Super Show, as well as such films as seventy
five's Friday Foster and seventy sevens The Kentucky Fried Movie.
But by the eighties he pretty much completely transitioned over
into the adult film industry, outside of a small role

(36:14):
in nineteen ninety one's The Guyver, which we talked about
the show, a science fiction film.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
That was one of some kind of like powered suit
or mask.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah, biotechnology suit with screaming Mad George effects. That's right, yeah, yeah,
some fun stuff. Mark Hamill is in that one. But
at any rate, Baker, outside of that film just adult industry.
After this point. He continued to work in that industry
for the remainder of his career. Was nominated for awards
in the adult industry and eventually transitioned into comedic, non

(36:47):
sexual roles in the adult industry. And this is interesting
as well because there's at least one more adult actor
in the film. Johnny Keyes, who lived nineteen forty through
twenty eighteen, is in this film. I'm not sure who
he plays. It must be like a small part. I
don't think he's credited, but he was in the Picture
Behind the Green Door, pretty famous adult film of the

(37:11):
of this time period that shot on the same sound
stage as Space is the Place, oh, you know, using
some of the some of the same space, so you know,
I don't know if like one shooting days, one shooting nights,
that sort of thing, but yeah, these were both coming
together at the same time. Cool, all right? There There

(37:32):
are other like secondary antagonists in the film, and they
are NASA operatives. They are this will NASA assassins.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
One of the weirdest plot elements that I did not
expect is this movie has absolutely wicked, racist, murderous NASA technicians.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
Yes, yes, and the main one, the nastiest of them,
is Agent number one and he is played by Morgan Upton,
who lived nineteen thirty through nineteen ninety one. Upton is
best known as one of the four Stormtrooper voice actors
working in nineteen seventy seven Star Wars.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, so when you hear the original Star Wars any
of that Stormtrooper chatter, Morgan Upton is in there somewhere.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Must be another one of these drills.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah. His other credits include seventy two's The Candidate, seventy
seven's Nightmare in Blood, seventy nine's More American Graffiti, eighty
six is Peggy Sue Got Married, in eighty eight s
Tucker the Man in His Dream, and then finally I'll
just mention that we have Son Raw and his orchestra
in this, so you will see a number of orchestra members.

(38:43):
The credited members of the orchestra president are John Gilmore,
Danny Davis, Larry Northington, Kawami Haddi, Ken Moshesh. June Tyson,
she's the vocalist. You see her multiple times. She's great.
I mean a lot of Sunrise music, like, she's pretty iconic.
Can you hear someone singing? Space is the place? It's

(39:05):
June Tyson.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
She's doing a lot of the doing a lot of
the chanting.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah. Yeah, Marshall Allen, we already mentioned the current member
of current leader band Leader of the Orchestra, you see
him in this as well, elo Emoe, Danny Thompson, Lex Humphreys,
and Tommy Hunter uh and of this group, I think
Marshall Allen and Danny Davis are the only ones who
are still part of the band. You know, several have

(39:30):
passed on since this film was made, but again, the
Orchestra is still out there touring by all means, go
out and see them and listeners. If you have seen
the Orchestra perform live at any point during its existence,
write in and tell us about it.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
Have you been a member of the orchestra at any point?

Speaker 2 (39:47):
That would be impressive as well.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
Would please please write in Contact that stuff to blow
your mind dot com. Okay, are you ready to talk
about the plot to some extent at least?

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (40:06):
I'm not going to do a chronological scene by scene
narration of this movie, as we've said before. I think
that works better for some of the like sillier like
B movies we do. Instead here, I think we should
talk about the opening couple of sequences in detail, because
they established some of the themes and structure of the rest,
and then we can move on to some general comments

(40:26):
and observations.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Oh, and by the way, inserting this from later because
I forgot to say it earlier. If you're not familiar
with our show, we usually we will discuss like through
the whole plot of the movie and including ending details.
So if you want to have things not spoiled and
see the movie, you know, going in fresh, you should
stop here and go check it out. The movie opens
in space, appropriately with stars hanging in the darkness.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Most of the films we talk about started, it's.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
A very common opening. Yeah, so stars in space and
these steady pulses of organ music, just a chord on
the organ pulsing and then swelling and then fading, and
then a spaceship enters the scene, gliding through the middle
distance of the shot. This is the sun Raw Spaceship, Rob.

(41:16):
I don't know if you found is there a name
they give to this ship. If they mentioned it in
the movie, it went past me.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
I don't think they refer to it as is anything
other than sun Raw Spaceship. I often think of it
as the arc, yeah, because it's kind of an arc,
and you know, we think of the orchestra. But yeah,
I think it's just the spaceship.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
It is sort of a yellow gold color of fire,
shaped a bit like a dumbbell, with two spheres connected
by a tube in the middle, but the two spheres
on each side of the handle if it's a dumbbell,
have tails that make themach look kind of like a tadpole.
And then on the front of the two spheres there

(41:57):
are these concentric circular designs that look like rings of
green and orange flames surrounding central dots, which you could
think of as the pupils of eyes or the nipples
of breasts. So the spaceship is a very interesting image,
and like how many different other images it suggests all
at the same time. Clearly there is something of the

(42:20):
sun and solar deities about it, light and fire, there's
something of gold about it, organic imagery like breasts or eyes,
and also gamat cells to some extent ancient Egyptian religious
motifs are suggested by it, and I think not just
by proximity to the costumes. There's something about like the

(42:41):
concentric circles around the front that looks kind of Egyptian.
There's also the concept of balance, with the two lobes
balanced on a central bar. But also there are some
elements of more conventional science fiction spaceships, because later we're
going to see the ship flying through the air shooting

(43:02):
basically laser beams out of the eyes, though not as
a weapon in any scene that I recall. I believe
it's more for I don't know what. What do you
think the beams are for?

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Oh, and it's a great question like is it scanning?
Is it judging? We have this detail, we'll get to
where we have the card of judgment. The Tarot Card
of Judgment is held aloft by sun Raw and it
shows the spaceship on there. I don't know that that
gets into a question of like the doom that is
coming to Earth, the death sentence that is on Earth.

(43:33):
Is it like self generated or is there some degree
of judgment that is taking place because sun Ra and
his spaceship have come to Earth.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
It could be transmolecularization, yes, yes, it could very well be. Yeah.
So we see the spaceship, it's like gliding through space
and the voices voices start on the soundtrack. They ring
out in this reverberating call in response, and what they're
saying is it's after the end of the world. World,
don't you know that yet? And this goes on repeating

(44:04):
for some time, and then we start to hear the
instruments of the orchestra come in, playing this free jazz
crescendo with chaotic drums and the kind of scrambling high
pitched trumpet. So if you've heard free jazz before, sometimes
you'll hear a motif like this, like a horned instrument
just playing this fast, skittering, very high pitched solo that

(44:28):
it feels like it's just frantic.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Yeah, I really love the music in this opening sequence.
It feels like fittingly cosmic and dark and mysterious. Will
One sort of side question here is like, some of
you out there are very well acquainted with Sun Raw
and his orchestra, and perhaps already have your favorite albums.
Some of you might wonder, like, well, what's a good

(44:51):
place to start with Sun Raw? It's easier now than
ever before to go out and sample our new artists
that you're interested in, or artists that are new to you.
I ask a friend, my friend David Streepy, who's been
on the show before, what his advice is because he's
learned he's listened to a lot more son Raw than
I have, and one that he suggested to me that

(45:12):
I will pass on to listeners is Astro Black. You
can find that one. It's like four or five tracks.
You can find it wherever you stream your music, and
it a lot of the music on that release has
this kind of vibe to it, which I really appreciate.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
If I can also recommend one of his albums, I
was not super familiar with Sunro's music before. I think
I heard a little bit before, but none enough to
have any real knowledge or expertise about it. But I
started listening to some things before recording this episode, and
if I can recommend one of his earlier ones, it's
a little bit weird, but it has not gotten super

(45:49):
weird yet. It's called Interstellar Low Ways. I think it's
from the year nineteen sixty. I really enjoyed that one. Awesome.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah, I mean, it's good to have a place to
start because he put out so much music, and I'm
to understand there's a lot of music that he recorded
that has never been released, like this was his this
was his his compulsion, his passion, and yeah, so there's
just a lot of music out there. And again he
moved in different jazz waters. So I guess if you're

(46:17):
into jazz at all, or you think you might be,
there's a good chance something son raw recorded at some
point is going to connect with you.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Anyway. Coming back to this opening shot, I really like
how there are dynamics, you might say, almost like musical
dynamics at play in this opening. So the main thing
I was thinking about is there's a warm cool dynamic,
Like you get the warm musical tones of the organ
when the organ is pulsing at the beginning, and you

(46:45):
get the warm orange gold color of the spaceship, and
then against that you have the cool or cold sounds
created by like the reverb effect on the voices when
the chant is going on, and the high pitched brass
that feels like a cold sound, and then also the
cold imagery of deep space. And I don't know, it

(47:06):
feels like textually intentional to me.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
So after this opening, we pan over an illustrated image
of an otherworldly garden with diverse trees and flowers blooming
on the side of a hill while some credits play,
And then finally, while these strange jazz sounds are still playing,
we come up on a live action shot in a
forest with two figures in view, just two figures at first,

(47:33):
we'll see more later. One figure is sun Raw himself,
wearing his elaborate Egyptian garments with lots of gold, a
feronic headdress complete with this great urb and nestled in
a U shaped fork rising off the middle of his crown.
I think this is imagery of the solar disk pointing
to Auta or Raw. And then there's another figure alongside

(47:57):
sun Raw here, which is a figure closed entirely in
black robes with a black hood, so it's face its
face would be the only thing visible, but the face
is not visible because it is hidden behind a mask,
and the mask is just a mirror, so no face,
just a flat oval mirror.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, and it's never really explained who these mirror faced
entities are. I don't know, there acolytes of Sunrise and
the cosmic Realm or something, but I have read that
at some point in production this was supposed to be
the Overseer, but then they ended up going in a
different direction with how the Overseer would be represented in

(48:37):
the film. But I love the mystery of it here
and God, this whole opening sequence to spaces. The place
is one of the most mesmerizing things I could think
you could see. It's like the first like three and
a half minutes essentially the film. I mean, I defy
anyone to lose interest in the movie while watching this.
It just really sucks you in. It's so surreal, another

(49:00):
world lay out.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
It's wonderful, It's totally cool and so sunraw. He's walking
here in this garden. He raises up his hand, and
in his hand there is an object which he kind
of releases into the air. I think it is supposed
to be some kind of alien organism, but maybe it
could be a kind of biotechnology. It looks like a

(49:22):
cross between a jellyfish and a closed flower. So like
a closed flower has a long green stem terminating at
the top in this colorful pink and purple bulb, But
then above the bulb there is a transparent dome like
the bell of a jellyfish, and the stem structure kind
of tapers off below the body and becomes flexible, like

(49:44):
the trailing tentacles of a jellyfish. So it's this jellyfish flower.
The jellyfish flower being floats away and then seems to
travel beside Sunraw and his mirror faced companion hovering in
the air, I think, maybe leading them through the four
or maybe doing their bidding in the forest, and they
wander through the trees, seeing plants, some plants that look

(50:08):
like familiar earth plants, but also seeing alien flowers, some
of which look like horns, like trumpets or trombones, and
then also seeing alien fruits that kind of look like
huge pink dragon fruits. And by the way, the music
is still going, so the free form music of the
orchestra is still playing in the background here. And then suddenly,

(50:32):
underneath one of these pink fruits, we see a group
of flowers or other fruits shaped like human hands growing
from stems which are reaching up from below like they
are either praising the fruit or maybe ready to catch
the fruit when it falls. And then Sunraw sends his
jellyfish flower ahead of him into a clearing, and then

(50:53):
he stops wandering, and the camera focuses on him while
he seems to be contemplating something. First, he starts to
hum a tune, and you could think for a second, oh,
he's humming a tune. He's just bored or passing the time.
But then you realize he is assessing something about this place.
He is judging its qualities in how it receives the tune.

(51:17):
He hums, and he starts to speak. He says, the
music is different here, the vibrations are different, not like
Planet Earth. Planet Earth is the sound of guns, anger, frustration.
And now we see Sunraw is facing the figure in
the mirror mask and the hooded robes as if he

(51:37):
is speaking to that figure. But if the face of
a mirror is he speaking to himself? I don't know.
Also in the background here we can see other people
we haven't seen before. So there's a man standing aside
wearing a headdress representing the Egyptian falcon headed god Horus,
and he's back there. So we're getting more of a
flavor of Sunraw's group people traveling with him, and their

(52:02):
Egyptian cosmology reflected forms and shapes. Sunraw goes on talking.
He says, there was no one to talk to on
planet Earth who would understand. We set up a colony
for black people here. See what they can do on
a planet of their own without any white people there.

(52:22):
They could drink in the beauty of this planet. It
would affect their vibrations for the better, of course, another
place in the universe, up under different stars, that would
be where the altered destiny would come in. And during
this monologue, the camera pulls back and we see that
Sun Raw is not standing anymore. He's sitting on a
rock in the middle of this forest clearing. And I

(52:45):
want to note here we sort of alluded to this earlier,
but I think this is a good place to talk
about because we're hearing his monologue at this part in
the movie that Sunraw does not project much emotion about
this as he talked, though you can understand, like the
things he says are very full of feeling, They express

(53:07):
feelings about things. They're full of emotional verdicts and judgments
about things, So you can understand his feelings about the
subject matter from the words he says. But his physical
bodily performance throughout the movie is almost studiously calm, quiet, flat,
and unemotional. He has this air that is at once

(53:29):
mystical and intellectual, but never animated, and never showing much
emotion in his face, his body, or his tone of speaking.
And I assumed at first that this was a deliberate
choice made for the movie, maybe for the kind of
the character version of himself that he's playing.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
But I don't know.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
Looking at some interviews and Rob, I think you said
this that it seems he often presented himself that way
in interviews as well, even outside the context of the film.
So maybe it's just that's the way that he was
or the way that he often presented himself in public.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah, I think I think that's likely the case. I
would add another thing about the way he delivers these
these monologues is that he's there's not a clear sense
of affectation in his voice, like he is not trying
to speak like a space Buddha or something, or like
he sounds like against sounds very wise, knowledgeable, very charismatic,

(54:28):
but also sounds very much like a guy who was
born in Birmingham and lives in Philadelphia. You know, So
there's a he's very relatable in that sense.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Yeah, yeah, he's not. Again, it doesn't feel like he's
putting on a character. I think that's why. You know,
we were talking earlier about this sense that lines in
the movie feel like they could be improvised from him.
Of course they weren't improvised. He wrote them ahead of time,
but I think what we're really tapping in there, tapping
into there is not improvised as in made up on
the spot, but improvised as in just flowing naturally from

(55:02):
his real way of speaking, you know, not like lines
written for another character. But anyway, So in this scene
sun Ross start he sort of establishes the themes of
the movie, the philosophical and spiritual themes of the movie.
So one of the premises is that he wants to
set up a colony in space, a colony on this

(55:24):
beautiful other planet that can be a place for black people.
He also talks about the premise that the Earth is doomed.
In fact, it's so doomed that it's already after the
end of the world. Like we heard in the chant
at the beginning, there's a kind of there's a fatalism
about that. It's not just like doom is coming or

(55:45):
maybe coming, it's already happened in a sense.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Yeah, And I think in that like this seems to
tie into this idea like post colonial contact being a
kind of like a post apocalyptic existence some senses. But
at the same time, Sunrise very much will get into
the way that he treats time there is the sense
too that like it's after the end of the world,

(56:10):
perhaps after time has since has has ceased to make
any difference to us.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Well, let's get to that. So he explains. He talks
about how, in his view, the Earth in its present
state is not a good place for black people. So
he's going to set up a colony for black people
on this beautiful garden planet and they can live out
what he calls the altered Destiny. And that's again this
theme that comes up many times in the movie. He

(56:37):
starts to explain how people from Earth could be physically
and spiritually transported to this new planet. He says, equation wise,
the first thing to do is to consider time as
officially ended. We work on the other side of time.
It sort of suggests to me that time hasn't ended

(56:59):
in the sense of the end of life. We think
of the end of time as like the destruction of all,
but that time has ended in some other since allowing
the type of life idealized by Sun raw to go
on without it. That there can be life without time
on the other side of time.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
Anyway, after this, he gets to a very important point again,
like a core theme of the movie, which is the
method of transportation. How are we going to get the
people here to the planet, He says, we bring them
here either through isotope teleportation, trans molecularization, or better still,

(57:41):
teleport the whole planet here through music. And then we
get the title on screen, space is the place as
we see a human body. I think it might be sunrass,
somebody's floating in space in the gold chain mail head
dress with blue satin robes wrapped all around, or sometimes
extended like wings like the wings of an angel, or

(58:04):
maybe a bird like Egyptian god. But yeah, So the
final thought here is this key theme of the movie
that music can be a kind of spiritual and I think,
in some sense literal transportation technology which has powers to
take people body and soul through the cosmos to a

(58:25):
different place, to a better planet which is not dominated
and despoiled by the evil powers that rule this world.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, And other interviews I've hear him
talk about music as indeed a universal spiritual language.

Speaker 4 (58:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
So again, just an amazing intro to this film. First
what almost three and a half minutes, just absolutely mesmerizing,
sucks you in, and then we transport in time and
place to Chicago nineteen forty three.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
That's a strange transition. Yeah, you get a cipia toned
still shot outside of a bar with an old timey car.
There it says Chicago nineteen forty three. So yeah, we
cut to this bar, and this is where we're going

(59:21):
to meet some other major characters that appear throughout the film.
So inside the bar is full of cigar smoke and
hot piano music. We're hearing some bop, I guess or
some swing and there are tables with red tablecloths, folks
all dressed up for a nice night out on the town.
We see young military servicemen in their uniforms. We see

(59:43):
men and women in fancy dresses and tuxedos. And the
entertainment here at the club is music and dance. So
there's a group of sort of burlesque or cabaret dancers.
And then on the piano is Sonny Ray, a sort
of past earthly alter ego of Sun Raw. Not wearing
his usual cosmic Egyptian clothing. Here he's dressed in a

(01:00:07):
jacket with a very cool black and white chevron pattern.
I like that jacket, but underneath he's got this black
shirt with a cool necklace on and sunglasses and a
knit cap. He's playing the piano and he is cooking.
It's not the avant garde style of music. It's not
that like climbing the mountains of Mars music we heard earlier.

(01:00:30):
This is conventional, fast moving jazz piano. And I assume
that this scene is somewhat a nod to Sunraw's own
history of his own you know, like his own past
playing more conventional jazz music and as a more conventional
jazz band leader before his style started getting really weird
and different in the sixties.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
I want to note this is one of those scenes
where if you go back and rewatch the film, you
begin to notice that various other characters from the movie
Yes are present here, like the the two evil NASA guys.
They're here for some reason, totally unacknowledged. The big guy
Tiny from later in the film, he's here for some reason.
So it is the past, and we have a past

(01:01:12):
version of Sun Raw, but also there may be other
mortal characters who are just here in a different incarnation.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know what that means. I don't know. Well,
one thing I wonder is about where this scene originally
came in the ordering of the film.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Right right, yeah, again, it speaks to the way this
film was kind of like found and it's edit.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
But anyway, in this scene we also meet one of
the main villains of the movie, named the Overseer, who
on one hand is represented as a wealthy and powerful
pimp with expensive clothes and superficial charm though he can
he's charming and suave, but he can also be quite

(01:01:53):
vicious and cruel in some later scenes, and we're introduced
to him through dialogue between a couple of waitresses at
the bar. One explains to the other saying, that's the Overseer.
He sees something he wants, he gets it. He'll be
getting around to you soon. And that hints at the
fact that often the something that he wants is not
a thing, but a person, maybe even a person's soul,

(01:02:17):
because on the other hand, so that's what he is.
On one hand, he is a terrestrial kind of character,
this rich pimp, But on the other hand, the Overseer
is depicted as a figure of cosmic and spiritual evil
with godlike powers. He is shown as a tempter and
as a machiavellian manipulator, controlling and coercing people, coercing people's lives. So,

(01:02:43):
in many ways, as we said earlier, a figure likes Satan,
but I think also importantly different from Satan in some ways,
I see a big part of his role as being
an enforcer of fate or destiny. Did you also see
this theme that like many of the human characters in
the film are kind of on a set of rails.

(01:03:05):
They are on this predetermined path of destiny where they
are headed for confusion, unfreedom, and doom, and the overseer
wants them to stay on those rails and keep them
headed for this bad place, the place of bafflement and powerlessness.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Yeah. Yeah, even as those characters at times like acknowledge
like why am I on this path? Why am I
doing this?

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
Yeah? By contrast, Son Raw in his various forms, will
appear to people and offer them another path, an altered destiny,
in which they can expand their consciousness, liberate themselves in
some important way, and wake up to the knowledge that
there is a place for them in something great and

(01:03:50):
wondrous if they will take it, a place in space.
And it brings us back to this main metaphor here.
But in this scene in the Bar Chicago, the overseer
he arrives at the bar with a couple of women.
There's like a woman on each of his arms. He's
in sunglasses indoors, and he's got a pink flower on
his lapel. His party is seated at a table near

(01:04:13):
the front row, and he buys a cigar. He talks
to the matre d and comments on the piano player,
which again this is son Raw is Sonny Ray, And
of course you know the matre d is very proud
of their music there. You know, this is one of
the best piano players he's ever heard. But the overseer says, no,
I hate him. I want him off the stage. So
he instantly recognizes that's his enemy. And the matre d

(01:04:37):
goes up on stage and I don't know if he's
the matre d he took. He's some kind of a
central figure announcer. He goes up and takes the microphone
and tries to move things along from the piano segment
into the next act. So he announces, you know, the
cabaret dancers are going to come out and perform. But
here things get kind of funny. Sonny Ray is supposed

(01:04:57):
to play the dancers on, but he refusing to shift
into the dance music and is just vamping on the
piano from the end of the song he was playing,
and the vamping just gets weirder and weirder musically, and
eventually he and people are getting very annoyed with him
because of this. Eventually he does start picking up the

(01:05:19):
tempo and the dancers start to come out, but while
it sounds like the rhythm is right for the dancers
to start, he's also playing all of these bizarre dissonant
chords and scales on top of it, and it seems like,
I don't know if you interpreted it the same way
that I did, but it's like the weirdness of the

(01:05:40):
music unleashes a kind of elemental force on the bar,
and it's like the weirdness is a power of itself,
and it starts blowing like wind starts blowing and kicking
up clouds of dust and glass breaks everywhere, and people
start screaming and running for the exits. And then the

(01:06:00):
sounds of the real son Raw Orchestra come in on
the soundtrack So Gone, or the sounds of the nineteen
forty swing. Now we're hearing these high pitch scrambling horns
and the avant garde space music.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Yeah, a mighty wind is summoned by this. It's almost
like this whole club was in an airlock, and now
the air lock has been breached.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Yes, So people are streaming down the staircases, tripping over
each other to get out. There's a mirror ball hanging
from the ceiling that falls down and crashes to the floor.
I don't know if that has any significance.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
There's one of the burlesque dancers has a pasty blown
right off the nipple.

Speaker 3 (01:06:39):
Oh, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
So there's a lot of humor in this sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:06:44):
So yeah, smoke, wind, flashes of colored lights, beings that
seem like maybe they could be aliens appear briefly in silhouette,
and the smoke, and eventually the piano itself rolls away
from under Sunny Ray's hands, leaving Sunny Ras and the
overseer sitting across from each other alone in silence. So

(01:07:06):
I think by refusing to just play the dance music
and insisting on his own strange and unpredictable musical explorations,
Sonny Ray has somehow unleashed a storm of literal physical
energy and transformation, and people are frightened and they run
from the music, but it is altering reality all around them.

(01:07:30):
I don't know if I was reading too much into that,
but it feels significant about what it's supposed to mean
for sun Ra's life.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Yeah, yea, and I think that that seems fair. That
lines up with with my viewing of the of the scene.
But now we have just the sun son Raw and
the overseer just contemplating each other, and this is where
we're going to eventually get to a game of cards.

Speaker 3 (01:07:52):
That's right. So they're left alone, and the overseer says,
you think you're ready for me? And Sonny Ray says,
are you ready to alter your desk? That's a good reversal.
The overseer explains that they're going to play a card game,
and he starts listing games that his opponent can choose from.
He's like, you want to play seven up whist and
son Raw holds up a deck of cards and says,

(01:08:14):
I say the end of the world.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Yeah, and it's a Tarot deck.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
Okay, I didn't catch that at first, but yeah, it
does have taro like imagery when we start seeing the
cards and then they are suddenly teleported. They teleport out
of the club to the middle of a vast desert plane,
where Sun Raw now I think appearing. Would you say,
at the moment of the teleportation, he's no longer Sunny Ray.

(01:08:40):
He is now as his transcended self. Yeah, he is
son Raw here, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Fully for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
So now he is son Raw wearing his gold chain
mesh head dress, and he's sitting across from the overseer
at a red velvet topped game table with gold fringe
and this diamond shaped hole in the middle of the table.
Once again, the overseer asks Sun Raw to name the game,
but he specifies that he will cut the deck, and

(01:09:07):
this happens a few more times in the movie. The
overseer always wants to cut the deck, which I think
is supposed to imply he's cheating. Some of that means, Okay,
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:09:16):
A lot about cards, but I would assume the see
I cheats the cards. Yes, yes, So the overseer draws
a couple of cards from this tarot like deck. First,
he draws the World, showing a picture of the planet Earth.
So to me, that signifies the connection of this planet
with the overseer.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
The evil deity. It seems to go with Sunra's philosophy.
And then also he draws a card labeled the Chariot
and it shows a big nineteen seventies luxury sedan. And
then he throws the cards into the diamond pit. And
now it's sun Ra's turned to draw. He reaches into
the deck, he draws a card and reveals it has

(01:09:55):
a picture of his spaceship, the one with the two
golden lobes and the flaming like eyes. And that card
is labeled Judgment. It's pretty brutal.

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
Yeah, And that's that's what does make me wonder. It's like,
to what extent is son Raw here to judge? To
what extent are the laser beams from his spaceship like
beams of judgment and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
I mean, I don't think it is to the extent
of the day the Earth stood still when it's actually like,
you know, there is a weapon, but there is at
least a sense of moral or spiritual judgment. I don't
know if that extends to actual like punishment.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Yeah, I've thought about this a bit, and I think
I think it's pretty clear that the coming cataclysm is
brought on by humanity. You know, it is because we
are out of tune with ourselves, and we're out of
tune with the music, and we don't have true music
in our hearts.

Speaker 3 (01:10:50):
It is for those who do not accept the altered destiny. Yeah,
so a lot of the rest of the movie is
going to consist of scenes with other characters intercut back
and forth with this game of cards played in the desert.
So the game seems to be fought over the fates

(01:11:12):
of the people of Earth. Did you take it the
same way?

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:11:15):
Yeah, But basically I would say every time something bad happens,
like every time the humans live in confusion and move
toward the doom destiny, the overseer counts a hand as
his he like notches one for himself. And every time
something weird or good happens and the people wake up

(01:11:36):
to self liberation and space consciousness, Sunraw wins a hand,
but Sun Raw he falls behind. He wins fewer hands
than the overseer until the end.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Yeah, you know, that's generally how you wanted to go
in any kind of card game or a sporting event
that takes place in a movie, you know, the person
you're rooting for, and he's slowly come up from behind.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Yeah. But before we go to any of these other scenes,
we cut to some concert footage, the son Raw Orchestra concert.
So it is we come in in the middle of
this awesome percussion frenzy where we first see the percussionists playing,
you know, like the people who have hand drums playing
the hand drums. But then we pull back and I

(01:12:17):
love this. We see and hear that everybody is playing
some kind of percussion, so like the woodwind section of
the orchestra, they have their woodwind instruments set aside, and
they're drumming on bells and I think even on their
music stands. And then finally the saxophones and the horns
come in and the energy of the band is crazy.
And so while the music keeps playing, we cut away

(01:12:40):
to the interior set of the spaceship, which is this
odd glowing amber space with walls that look like they
are made of polished wood but also have that water
dissolved Swiss cheese texture of karst you know what I mean,
kind of karst rock. And then there is a clear

(01:13:01):
glass door that you used to enter. I think this
is the cockpit of the spaceship. This is where you
pilot it. The clear glass door that opens by rotating
and it lets one person through the door of the
space ship at a time. Sunraw enters first, and he's
going to go sit down at the pilot console on
the ship. And what's there? Is it going to be
a steering wheel? No, because what powers the ship? It's music.

(01:13:25):
So he sits down to pilot the ship and it
is a keyboard. This is the method of space travel
technology powered by music.

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):
That's right, synth powered space travel, just like in Prometheus.
By the way, wait what I don't know the engineers
there in like little flutes and music and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:13:43):
They power it with music. I forgot about that. Yeah,
but yeah. So this goes on and then we see
the space ship approaches the Earth. It comes toward the
planet Earth, and then it comes down into our atmosphere
and it flies over some cities. We see it flying
over the mountainuntains in the neighborhoods. And this is the
part where it's shooting like red laser beams out of

(01:14:04):
the things that look like eyes or nipples. I don't
know what that's it, because again I don't think we
see the lasers hurting anybody, so I don't think they're.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Part of the guidance system or something. Yeah, it looks
very good too, I have to say, for what is
by all accounts, you know, a lower budget affair here,
and the effects here of the flying spaceship look really solid.
I like it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:26):
So in the scene where the spaceship flies over the
surface of the Earth, we meet the character Jimmy Fay
as himself here. He is a TV presenter from Channel
five in Oakland, California, which they say is an all
black TV station, and he's on scene reporting on the
fact that quote. As you probably know, several local mystics
have predicted a landing from space this afternoon here at

(01:14:50):
this spot opposite the Sector five government building, in the
person of a black musician and thinker named Son Raw.
So apparently the backstory is that Sun Raw disappeared while
traveling in Europe on tour in nineteen sixty nine, and
now several years later he returns to Earth in his
glorious spaceship with his what they called his intergalactic myth

(01:15:14):
science Solar Orchestra, and then Jimmy Fay says, upon landing here,
he will reveal to the world his so called plan
for the salvation of the Black Race. So the spaceship
sets down in the middle of a field, and Jimmy
Fay seems at first not to believe his own eyes.
I don't know. I think maybe the implication is that

(01:15:36):
he was initially reporting on this story like ironically, like Haha,
what a joke you know this is? But then he
sees the ship land and he's shaken. He's like, what's
this going to mean? So he goes on reporting on it,
and then along with the crowd, he runs up to
the ship to greet Sun Raw and his crew as
they come out of the spaceship. By the way, like

(01:15:59):
the raw eyeball sirens are blasting the whole time. Yeah,
And so Sun Raw disembarks with his retinue and they're
all dressed in these gold and billowing capes.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
Wind machine blasting. This movie makes great use of wind.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
Machines awesome, and the costumes of Egyptian deities. You've got
solar orbs, you have a Nubis and Horus all marching
out with the band following playing music behind them. So
it's like a marching jazz free jazz orchestra band coming
out of the spaceship with these figures dressed like gods
from ancient Egypt. It's just awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
And Jimmy Fay is here to report. They bring out
a like a crystal clear space helmet. Yeah, they present
it to him, and I want to also mention that
the guy bringing it out, he walks kind of like
he's on the surface of the moon. This is apparently
something that was a feature of some of the orchestra performances,

(01:17:00):
walking like this. So he brings this out. Jimmy Fay
puts it on, and I guess it allows Jimmy Fay
to is it like an interpreter helmet, I don't know,
somehow allows them to communicate directly with his brain.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
It's like a radio helmet to transmit sun Raw consciousness
into Jimmy Fay's brain. I think, well, like he puts
it on and then there's you know, keyboard madness going
into his head and Sundraw is inside his head saying
I am the altered Destiny, I am the living myth
and so in this scene and then also it like

(01:17:36):
triggers Jimmy Fay to ask questions about what's going on,
or either he or somebody says, what is the power
of your machine? And Sunraw's answer is music, and he
goes on to say more. There's more monologuing in this scene.
But I also love the way that the radio helmet
is held up like like a chalice, like it is

(01:17:57):
a the sacred cup of ice, you know, being held
up like that, but it's receiving these signals either from
space or from cosmic sun Sun Raw consciousness. Yeah, yeah,

(01:18:18):
so I think maybe we'll stop there and because that
that sort of like sets up the the main themes
of the movie. But after this we're gonna have continued
themes of Sun Raw in conflict with the overseer trying
to break through and reach the people of Earth. A
lot of the story is building toward a planned concert

(01:18:40):
that Sunraw and his orchestra are going to play in
at the end of the movie, I think at at
an Oakland music venue. So a lot of the movie
is set specifically in Oakland, California. But then there are
these also these other scenes that intercut in between. There's
one interesting scene that we probably talk about a bit

(01:19:01):
of Sun Raw appearing to and preaching to the kids
at the Oakland Youth Center. So they're just kid teenagers
hanging out there and Sunraw appears to them and tries
to sort of recruit them to his cause, or at
least speak wisdom to them. I don't know if the
recruiting is explicitly the goal, but he is appearing like
a wandering preacher who is there to tell them truths

(01:19:25):
that they are not ready to hear, and so we
sort of met with skepticism, but he also breaks through
a bit by speaking wisdom about their lives, about like
racial inequality and injustice and about you know, things that
people don't usually want to acknowledge about their lives. So
he kind of wins some tentative converts from this appearance.

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):
Yeah, it's a great sequence in part because it's like
it's very obviously a real community center and it has
almost exclusively non actors in it. You know, it's like
actual youth, actual children that are asking these questions. And
for me, someone who grew up on watching se Me
Street from the late seventies and early eighties, it has
very much that kind of that kind of feel. You know,

(01:20:07):
this this film is steeped in nineteen seventies and nos.
So if you have any amount of nostalgia for that
time period, you know it's going to connect with you.
But yeah, sun Ross speaks to them, and I'm going
to read some of what he says here. This is
a bridge. But he says because they're asking him, like,
are you real? What are these crazy shoes you're wearing?
When does this outfit, you know, make fun of his shoes? Yea, yeah,
they got those moon shoes. And he says, how do

(01:20:30):
you know I'm real? I'm not real. I'm just like you.
I do not come to you as a reality. I
come to you as the myth. I came from a
dream that the Black Man dreamed long ago. I'm actually
a present sent to you by your ancestors. And he
seems to win people over, you know, there were some
doubters and people are like, yeah, yeah, I think I'm

(01:20:51):
understanding what he's laying down.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
There will be a scene also later in the movie
where some of the teenagers are wrestling with the accusation
that Sounra sold out.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
Yeah plant by the overseer, you know very much. They're like, oh,
he doesn't want to save you. He just wants to
make money off of you. And so whether it's kind
of clever how the film you know, plays with this
idea of like you know, I mentioned how not everybody
was like, oh, the Sunra guy is great, Like some
people are like this is silly or this is you know,
he's putting on a show for certain segments of the audience,

(01:21:23):
and you know, this film is kind of acknowledging that
to a certain extent. And also, you know, this is
kind of anytime you have a you know, a preacher
or a teacher or a bringer of wisdom, there are
going to be those that doubt him. And how is
he going to respond to those voices of doubt?

Speaker 3 (01:21:39):
Yeah. So another thing that Sunrah does in the middle
of the movie is he sets up the Outer Space
Employment Agency.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
Yeah yeah, I mean basically sets up an office for
recruiting individuals to board the spaceship and leave for the
other world colony.

Speaker 3 (01:21:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
And this is where we meet our NASA operatives. Who
one of them though not Upton, but the other one
I guess, like Agent number two comes.

Speaker 3 (01:22:05):
Here's the same guy who's later one of the killers.

Speaker 2 (01:22:08):
I think he is he or he looks a lot
like Agent number two either way. But I love the
scene where he's coming in and he's like, allow me
to be blunt, mister Raw, and he's inquiring about about
working for him, of course, so that he can steal
sun Raw's secrets of space travel and deliver them to NASA.

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):
Yeah, so he tries to sign up, but the NASA
scientist is he is very confused by what sun Raw
explains about his vision for space travel, a sort of
in that it's not going to be like a capitalist
material conquest but a musical transformation of our nature. And

(01:22:47):
the fact that there is no money, there's no pay Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:52):
Yeah, there's a great really one of the great comedic
scenes we see later the with the with the agency
that he's set up. Here is where we have this
this character, the street character that is a drunk. We
see that he is, you know, constantly drinking and scheming
how he's going to get his next bottle. He comes
in inquiring about work, and uh. He and Raw have

(01:23:14):
a great back and forth about like you know, ros
talking about being something and nothing and and what has
this guy been doing? We's been doing nothing. What can
Raw pay him? Well? Also nothing? Uh, it's it's it's
rather well put together.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
Let's see, in the middle of the movie, there are
a lot of scenes of like the overseer just using
and abusing people. Uh, he's portrayed as a pimp and
and there. So there's like that leads into this very
bizarre scene later where the two these two NASA employees
who are like NASA technicians, but they're also like doing

(01:23:50):
evil espionage trying to get son Raw's secretive space technology.
They end up going to a brothel and then like
becoming horrible racist and abusive and like beating up these
two women who work there.

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
The overseer has like pushed in their direction.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
Yes, totally. Yeah, so that was I don't know, it's
like a bizarre tangent in the film, but like absolutely
evil NASA technicians. And then after that they're like, well,
we just got to kidnap son Raw. So that leads
into the Sun Raw kidnapping plot where they they snatch him,
put him in a van and kidnap him and tie

(01:24:30):
him up, and they're going to try to force him
to give up the secret of his space travel technology
because they can't figure out how he does it. It's
also like weird. They torture him by making him listen
to marching band music. Well it's a marching band playing
Dixie Yeah yeah, yeah, and so he So son Raw

(01:24:50):
is trapped by these horrible NASA technicians, but then he
is rescued by the young men who believe in him,
so like they kind of find courage in themselves go
they like recruit their friends and they go break into
this facility and they get son Raw out and take
him to so he makes it to the final concert.

Speaker 2 (01:25:08):
Yeah, it's like it's Bubbles Bernard, I think is the
the other guy, and then there's Tiny the big guy.

Speaker 3 (01:25:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
The the NASA plot is dinner. I keep thinking about it,
you know, the evil NASA operatives who are also ultimately
going to be kidnappers and assassins. And I guess this
is also one of those you can't think too literally about.
But I was thinking this over and I guess it's
less maybe the idea that NASA wants to steal Sunraw's
space secrets. I mean it's that too, obviously, but it's

(01:25:38):
also like an attempt by a dominator culture to reverse
engineer some sort of artificial salvation for themselves based on
the authentic salvation of a partnership culture to lean on
terms from rain Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, which
to be clear, didn't come out till much later eighty seven.

(01:25:59):
But in kind of like looking at these ideas, I
realized there's actually, apparently there's a jazz artist, but an
him of Nicole Mitchell, who has done some afrofuturist work
that directly plays with some of these concepts from The
Chalice and the Play. So sorry tangent there, but I
was like, oh, that's that's neat.

Speaker 3 (01:26:16):
How that comes to get well, yeah, I mean, I
think it's the way it's portrayed is that these two
NASA technicians represent a just sort of predatory white power
structure that is sort of like beyond hope of achieving
like a greater higher consciousness of cooperation or anything like that.
They're just trying to steal and pillage and dominate.

Speaker 2 (01:26:40):
And and they're completely incapable of understanding what sunraw Is
is even doing or offering. Like they're completely you know,
when they're presented with it, they're like, I don't understand it. Well,
I guess we've got to kidnap him. In torture him,
and then when that doesn't work, they're like, I guess
we need to kill him. We have to assassinate him.

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
So I guess here we're coming to describing the end
of the film, which does involve a big concert, and
we get to see a lot of the musical performance itself,
of Sunraw and the orchestra putting together this great and
beautiful noise here at the concert. But the concert also
does have an assassination plot. So the NASA technicians break

(01:27:18):
in and they end up trying to They put their
guns on Sunraw, they take aim at him, but intervention
comes in the form of Sunraw's young disciples, like the
young men he's been sort of reaching out to throughout
the film. They get in between the bullet and Son Raw.
But then we get some like back to life rejuvenation,

(01:27:41):
bringing back to life through the magical power, magical technology,
technology science, myth power of music.

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):
That's right. Bubbles, I believe, is the one that takes
a bullet for Sun Raw jumps in front of the
bullet and it seems like, oh, he's dead, but then
Sunraw reaches out a hand, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):
And so he's resurrected in the spaceship. So they all
get to go to their place in space. They appear
in the spaceship and they move through the pivoting glass door,
remember the glass door that rotates to let you into
the sort of wood kars amber room at the heart
of the spaceship. And so they come in, and then
through this musical performance, there is also kind of just

(01:28:20):
a rapturing, a general rapturing of people from all over
who are transported to or within the spaceship. There's also
a discussion at the spaceship at the end about who
can come in and who can't, or what part of
somebody might have to be left behind. And so yeah,
there's this whole discussion of like who is actually going

(01:28:41):
to space, and so some many people are taken away
with sun Raw into space. And then as we actually
do get to see the spaceship leave into space at
the end, and then the Earth just explodes. It's like
a piece of fruit with a firecracker in it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:56):
It harkens back to something that Ross says earlier in
the picture when he's in a car being driven around
and they have some of his attendants with him. He says,
if the planet takes hold of an altered destiny. There's
hope for everyone, but otherwise, the death sentence upon this
planet still stands. Everyone must die, and here we see
that happen as he leaves planet Earth. With those who

(01:29:18):
listen to his message and embraced the music and were
brought aboard this cosmic arc, they get to pass on
to the next world. The rest of the world explodes
and the perishes and darkness. Yeah so quite I mean again,
think of this as essentially a concert film. Pretty ballsy

(01:29:40):
for your your your concert film to end with the
destruction of Earth. The entire planet is destroyed. But it
you know, but but it's not just like gloom and
doom like it's you know, it's also it is about
salvation through the music and and then the power of music,
and we see that in play as well.

Speaker 3 (01:29:59):
Oh it's a old choice. It is one of the
most joyful and interesting explosions of planet Earth I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Yeah, yeah, and it looks pretty good. Pretty again, I
especially given the budget that they had to work with,
a lot of talented people made it work. They really
stretched those dollars and made the effects worthwhile.

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):
Here.

Speaker 3 (01:30:20):
One of the last things we do see in the
movie is just this fragment of the former sphere of
Earth spinning in space.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
Yeah. Yeah, and then that's the end. We don't get
to see these characters, of all the characters that were
raptured by Sun Raw, we don't get to see them
on the off world colony, in this new world or anything.
But you know, we have the idea that now life
is going to be better for everyone who took this
message to heart.

Speaker 3 (01:30:46):
In the moods where Son Raw wishes the movie had
just had had more beautiful things in it, I wonder
if that's what he had in mind, if you wanted
to focus more on the other side of time, if
you wanted to focus more on seeing that other life.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
Possibly, so yeah, yeah, you know, yeah. I wonder how
much of it was it was even necessarily plot based,
but more about like just visual expression of the ideas.
I'm not sure, but you know, that's that's a version
of the film we never got. This is the this
is the version we have, and it's it's it's pretty remarkable.
One of the things that I read in Space is

(01:31:23):
the Place the Life and Times of Sun Raw by
John Sweed, is that at the time when this movie
came out it was pretty weird, like like it was
a weird film in seventy four, but you know, it's
just it's it's it's become weirder in a way because
of all the nineteen seventy miss about it, you know,
all this nostalgia, you know, another time, and it's no

(01:31:45):
longer the contemporary world in some respects. Though at the
same time, obviously a lot of the messages of the
film still resonate today. It is. Yeah, it is just
such a resonant film. It just it some real staying
power and it's absolutely a joy to check out, totally. Yes, Yeah,

(01:32:05):
And you know, to whatever extent it draws people into
the music of Sun Raw, Yeah, I think that's tremendous
as well. Certainly, I think this was the main way
I learned about Sunrise. I knew, you know, I'm interested
in I've always been interested in in the nineteen seventies
and nineteen seventies cinema and then to a certain degree,
you know, space music. So this, this drew me in

(01:32:28):
and has led me to explore some more of Sunraw's
music outside of this, and again he's been highly influential.
There are any number of people who list Sunraw as
a primary influence as someone who really got them interested
in music in general and specifically different forms of jazz. Yeah,
all right, that space is the place. We're going to

(01:32:50):
go ahead and close the episode out here, but we'd
love to hear from everyone out there if you have
thoughts on Space is the place you have thoughts on
the music and the enigma of sun Raw right in,
we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on

(01:33:11):
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on weird House Cinema. If you
are on letterbox dot com, check us out there. Our
username is weird Ouse. We have a nice list of
all the films we've covered over the years, and sometimes
a peek ahead of what comes next. And wherever you
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you know, if you're listening to us in a purely

(01:33:33):
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(01:33:54):
ask to be reminded remind me to watch the show.

Speaker 3 (01:33:58):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, if to
suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:34:18):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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