Format: DVD

Release date: 23 June 2008

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Writer: Kinji Fukasaku

Titles: Blackmail is my Life, Black Rose Mansion, If You Were Young: Rage

Cast: Hiroki Matsukata, Tomomi Sato/Akihiro Miwa, Eitaro Ozawa, Masakazu Tamura/ Tetsuo Ishidate, Gin Maeda

Japan 1968/1969/1970

90/90/89 mins

The Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku is arguably best known in the West for Battle Royale (2000), his controversial depiction of civil unrest which re-imagined Lord of the Flies with high-tech weapons and Nintendo generation teenagers. However, he was also the director of sixty-five features, at once a commercially consistent ‘journeyman’ capable of working within numerous genres for Shochiku Studios, and also a serious social commentator with an acute awareness of the potential perils of post-war Japanese capitalism.

Blackmail is my Life (1968) follows the fortunes of a crew of hustlers who attempt to graduate from small-time extortion scams to taking down the yakuza and corrupt government officials. Although the film embraces the freewheeling spirit of Godard and Richard Lester, whilst also sharing stylistic similarities with the altogether more eccentric work of Seijun Suzuki, Fukasaku’s initially feverish depiction of youthful camaraderie in the age of new money belies a cautionary tone, or as its anti-hero puts it, ‘the prettier something looks on the outside, the more revolting it is on the inside’. This is also an apt description of the heroine of Black Rose Mansion (1969), in which the famed female impersonator Akihiro Miwa portrays a nightclub performer who becomes the star attraction of the titular gentleman’s club, only for her enigmatic presence to lead to tragedy when both her wealthy benefactor and his son fall under her spell. It is a rare excursion into gothic melodrama for the director, but he is not shackled by formal restrictions and indulges in a lurid nightmare sequence and a sitar-infused soundtrack. Less surreal and more socially relevant, If You Were Young: Rage (1970) concerns five low-level workers who pool their resources to purchase a truck and set up a delivery company, but the character flaws imbedded by their poor upbringing sabotage their plans for progression. Fukasaku’s social anger is palpable, yet each character is fully realised to avoid becoming a political mouth-piece, and the truck that they name Independence No. 1 serves as a symbol of the heavy price that can be paid for aspiring to economic freedom.

These films exhibit a vibrant aesthetic sensibility, one that maintains a cinematic coolness that never succumbs to camp or kitsch. Fukasaku frequently uses jump cuts, freeze-frames and colour-coded flashbacks to capture both a nation and a cinematic movement in transition, while scenes often erupt into moments of signature graphic violence, with each film featuring a protracted death, usually the result of a fatal knife wound. Although the influence of the French New Wave is evident, Fukasaku’s work is rarely as self-consciously detached as that of Godard or Truffaut; even the criminals of Blackmail is my Life develop a social conscience and recognise their own shortcomings, while If You Were Young: Rage employs the music of Taku Izumi as a stirring cry for the hopeless fate of the uneducated men who were left neglected by the economic boom. This box set will hopefully extend Western appreciation of the oeuvre of Fukasaku beyond his notorious cinematic swansong.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 July 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Writer: Kazuro Funabashi

Original title: Kuchizuke

Based on: the novel by Matsutarô Kawaguchi

Cast: Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Hitomi Nozoe, Aiko Mimasu, Sachiko Murase

Japan 1957

74 mins

‘In July 1957, Yasuzo Masumura’s Kisses used a free revolving camera to film the young lovers riding around on a motorcycle. I felt now that the tide of a new age could no longer be ignored by anyone, and that a powerful irresistible force had arrived in Japanese cinema.’ These lines were written by Nagisa Oshima in a landmark 1958 essay in which he described the revolution that was taking place in Japanese cinema, initiated two years earlier by the rich wild youth or ‘sun tribe’ (taiyozoku) movie Crazed Fruit, and confirmed by Masumura’s assured first feature. With its cool monochrome, nonchalant protagonist, freshness of tone and naturalistic feel, Kisses has as much to do with European neo-realism as it does with Japanese cinema, and was no doubt influenced by Masumura’s stint as a student at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome in the 1950s.

Just as in Oshima’s own Naked Youth (1960), Kisses centres on a young couple in post-war Japan, struggling with their first experiences of love and desire against a background of strict social conventions and difficult economic conditions. This oppressive environment appears literally: Kinichi and Akiko meet in prison where they’re both visiting their fathers, the former’s held for election fraud, the latter’s for embezzling funds in a desperate attempt to find the money to pay for his sick wife’s care. Kinichi and Akiko each need 100,000 yen to pay for bail, and it looks like Akiko may be forced to resort to prostitution. Despite her desperate situation, Akiko bursts with joie de vivre and she and Kinichi spend a blissful, carefree day at the beach, after an unexpected win at a bicycle race.

Kisses is an unaffected, crisp, fresh film, entirely devoid of the perverse pleasures of Masumura’s later films, and yet some of the director’s recurrent themes already surface here. Though social rules weigh the two young characters down, they face the morose repressiveness of the adult world with tremendous reserves of spirited energy. Both Kinichi and Akiko resist expectations and are rebels of a sort, but their revolt is fuelled by youthful exuberance and an irrepressible sense of freedom, rather than by a desire to destroy conventions or transgress boundaries. Akiko prefigures the long line of fascinating female characters to come in Masumura’s work, but without the (self-)destructive edge that marks so many of them. Kinichi describes Akiko as ‘full of life’, saying she ‘loves everything’. And indeed while later Masumura characters give in to more complicated and dangerous desires, Akiko is driven simply by an immense and infectious lust for life.

At the core of the film lies the initiation of Kinichi and Akiko to both love and money, and more specifically to the uneasy relationship between the two in the adult world. This is made particularly clear by Kinichi’s mother, a tough divorcee who will only pay her son attention if he makes himself ‘valuable’ to her. The later-period Masumura surfaces in the initial hardness of the mother, and in the suggestion that love is just another kind of transaction in a world where everything is valued in financial terms. But even she softens up in the end, as Akiko’s lovely spirit wins over. As in Naked Youth, it is the female character who teaches her boyfriend how to love.

An unusually sweet and sober film in Masumura’s oeuvre, Kisses is full of youthful energy and hope, with at its heart characters who believe that they can win against the odds. While Oshima’s films of the period are filled with disillusionment and despair, Kisses celebrates the pleasure of being young, poignantly framed within a difficult social and economic situation.

Virginie Sélavy

By the same director: Irezumi, Manji, Red Angel, Blind Beast.

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 June 2008

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Il-gon Song

Writer: II-gon Song

Original title: Geomi sup

Cast: Woo-seong Kam, Jung Suh, Kyeong-heon Kang, Hyeong-seong Jang, Byung-ho Song

South Korea 2004

120 mins

The central protagonist of Spider Forest is not the luckiest of souls. When we first encounter Kang Min, he is awakening in the titular forest, having been knocked unconscious, only to wander into a remote cabin where his girlfriend and his boss have been brutally hacked to death. Catching a glimpse of the killer, he is pursued through the woods until he finds himself on a freeway, and is hit by a vehicle, sustaining a head injury that renders him comatose. Spider Forest then balances two time-frames that gradually deconstruct the fractured psyche of Kang Min. Through flashbacks, we learn that he lost his wife in a plane crash, and has embarked on a new relationship with a colleague from the TV station where he serves as the producer of a true-life mystery programme. This is juxtaposed with Kang Min’s return to the Spider Forest to reconstruct the events prior to his accident, and revelations about his own past and its relation to the area.

Writer-director II-gon Song has adopted a determinedly obtuse approach to the psychological thriller genre, and although details of his film will continue to puzzle even the most attentive viewer long after the closing credits, the twist in the tale is obvious from the outset, making Spider Forest a dramatically inert experience, albeit an intriguing and atmospheric one. Non-linear narratives and distorted memories have become favoured cinematic approaches and subjects in recent years, and Spider Forest shares similarities with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr in its juggling of the real and the imagined. The relationship between Kang Min and the sympathetic police detective who wants to believe that the obvious murder suspect is actually the victim of an elaborate corporate set-up, is reminiscent of the bond that develops between the disfigured playboy of Alexander Amenabar’s Abre los ojos and his fatherly psychiatrist, although Song’s film is too preoccupied with its own form of symbolic logic to properly develop any palpable character dynamics or emotive undercurrents.

Ultimately, Spider Forest lacks the narrative momentum of those earlier films, succeeding more as a series of strangely unsettling moments. Kang Min grinning perversely when he cuts his mouth on a whisky glass whilst drowning his sorrows, or his wife miming the eating of an apple as she makes herbal tea are scenes that linger longer than the themes of memory and personal loss, or the explicit blood-letting of the final reel. Woo-seong Kam is oddly emphatic in the lead role, but of the supporting characters, only Kang Min’s stone-faced boss registers, delivering such business maxims as ‘If the sword is too short, you lunge’ and ‘If things are tough, double your efforts’ as he simultaneously performs sexual acts and munches on fresh fruit. Those who become entangled in Spider Forest may struggle with its sedate pacing and overly interpretive conclusion, yet the beautifully photographed opening and closing scenes, and a haunting score that is reminiscent of Mychael Danna’s music for the films of Atom Egoyan, lend the film a dreamlike quality that is far removed from most Asia Extreme offerings.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 July 2008

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Franck Vestiel

Writers: Franck Vestiel and Pierre Bordage

Cast: Clovis Cornillac, Vimala Pons

France 2007

98 mins

As soon as the epigraph that opens Eden Log appears on the screen, ‘So the Lord God banished him from the garden of Eden to serve the ground from which he had been taken’ [Genesis 3.23.], you know that you’re in for a sci-fi movie with metaphysical pretensions along the lines of Cube.

Clovis Cornillac plays a man who wakes up naked in a cave with no idea of who he is or how he got there. Climbing out of the cave, he finds the entrance to a plantation where an automated orientation video tells him that if he wants to be admitted to paradise, he must tend to the tree (the Tree of Knowledge? the Tree of Life?) growing in the centre of the plantation. The video goes on to say that the tree’s sap is the source of enough energy to power a city. Not only that, but the sap makes the workers mining it down in the caves impervious to pain and fatigue. But where are all these workers? Unfortunately for Cornillac’s character, what’s really going on is that the tree absorbs energy from the workers by plunging its roots into them and if that doesn’t annihilate them, the sap turns them into mutants with a taste for human flesh.

Through this highly metaphorical plot, writer-director Franck Vestiel could be referring to organised religion as a system of control, or – as it’s later revealed that the workers are immigrants – he could be making a comment on the political expedience of crusades such as the war on terrorism. However, the religious/political references don’t really stand up to close scrutiny and the film is best enjoyed if they are just interpreted as an excuse for an atmospheric escape movie.

Atmospheric, but not exactly original. Fully aware of the history of the genre, Vestiel foregrounds his influences: the elevators used to take up the dead bodies that have been discarded by the tree like spent batteries are translucent cubes. But the film that Eden Log owes most too is Alien. There’s an Alien homage early on when Cornillac’s character finds a technician being eaten alive stuck to a wall. Endless corridors and hanging ducts represent the roots of the tree instead of the guts of a spaceship. Instead of stomachs bursting out, they are burst into by the tree’s roots. Like Ridley Scott, Vestiel relies on dimly lit, highly detailed sets to create atmosphere. Refreshingly, there’s no CGI in sight until the very last scene.

Because almost all the dialogue comes from the video recordings that Cornillac’s character encounters along the way, the DVD is able to boast both a French and an English version of the film. It seems like a great idea, allowing Vestiel to double his audience. However, it doesn’t quite work as not enough attention has been paid to the dubbing of the little dialogue that Cornillac does have, so you’re still better off watching the movie in French with English subtitles.

Alexander Pashby

Format: DVD

Release date: 4 August 2008

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: David Lynch

Writers: Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren, David Lynch

Cast: John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft

USA 1980

124 mins

Arguably one of David Lynch’s finest works, The Elephant Man was his first major studio film. The inexperienced director only kept his position thanks to the unlikely patronage of comedian Mel Brooks, whose Brooksfilms produced the movie for Paramount. According to Lynch, a private screening of his debut film Eraserhead ended with Brooks declaring, ‘You’re a mad man, I love you. You’re in’. And, as this film shows, it was a great decision.

Lynch makes the jump from American Gothic to Victorian Gothic with ease. The scenes of top hat-wearing doctors searching through the seamier sides of London could be straight out of a RL Stevenson novel, while the film is directed with far more atmosphere and style than anything from the Hammer studio. From the opening shot – a dreamlike image of Merrick’s mother’s ‘encounter’ with an elephant (apparently one did escape from a zoo in Leicester, the real-life Merrick’s hometown, around the time of his birth) – we are clearly in the realm of the fairy tale, a world akin to Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

The pantomime villains, who resemble Oliver Twist‘s Bill Sykes and Fagin, treat Merrick like a circus side-show. The night porter, in a brilliant turn from Michael Elphick at his most obnoxious, brings drunken revellers to ‘visit’ Merrick (including a young Pauline Quirk), while his former ‘owner’, the fairground showman Bytes, parades him like a performing animal. Tellingly, Bytes is a character invented for the film: the real-life Merrick made a lot of money by exhibiting himself in carnivals, before being robbed by his business partner.

Merrick is rescued by Dr Treves (Anthony Hopkins) who at first seems eager to use him to further his own career. ‘He’s only being stared at all over again’, the head nurse tells him. But when Treves has a crisis of conscience, he puts the simple question to his wife – ‘Am I good man or am I a bad man?’ We are in no doubt as to the answer.

As Merrick becomes more accepted, having tea in the Treves’ drawing room and taking a trip to the theatre, Lynch skilfully avoids the mawkishness of films like Mask. The moments of sentimentality are a result of Merrick’s character, rather than the film trying to provoke an emotional response from the audience. It is Merrick who overreacts, bursting into tears when being ‘treated so well by a beautiful woman’ and placing the actress Mrs Kendal’s signed photo next to one of his mother. John Hurt puts in a great emotional performance through all of the latex and make-up; Hopkins does just as well through the doctor’s equally confining middle-class restraint.

As with all such tales, morality is simplified into two polar extremes (‘twin peaks’ of good and evil) with little grey area in between. The Elephant Man is depicted as an innocent whose soul is as beautiful as his body is ugly (a twist on Dorian Gray perhaps). As we gradually get to know him, we discover him to be god-fearing, well-spoken (without a hint of a Leicester accent), sensitive and even romantic. ‘You’re not an elephant man, you’re Romeo’, Mrs Kendal (Anne Bancroft) tells him after reading a scene together.

The Elephant Man is a beautiful film, and not simply because of Freddie Francis’s monochrome cinematography. It is a story told with just the right amount of wonder and emotion (although Barber’s Adagio has perhaps been overused since). The combination of David Lynch and Britain’s finest acting talent – Gielgud even makes an appearance – makes you wish he’d made more films in the UK.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 July 2008

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Nagisa Oshima

Writer: Tamura Tsutomu

Based on: novel by Taijun Takeda

Original title: Hakuchu no torima

Cast: Kei Sato, Fumio Watanabe, Saeda Kawagushi, Akiko Koyama

Japan 1966

99 mins

Based on the true story of the rapist and serial murderer Eisuke, Violence at High Noon is a detached and disturbing portrait of post-war Japan that owes much to the films of Alain Resnais and Robert Bresson in terms of its non-linear structure and its fascination with the amoral activity of the social outsider. Now firmly established as a key contributor to the Japanese New Wave, director Nagisa Oshima attended film school in France, and his fragmented approach to narrative and scathing critiques of his native society in the age of Westernisation singled his work out as the antithesis of the humanist cinema of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Viewing the film more than forty years after its initial release, the shocking subject matter and elliptical aesthetic sensibility of Violence at High Noon suggest that Oshima’s work has had significant influence on such later cinematic provocateurs as Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell and Olivier Assayas.

Eisuke (Kei Sato) is introduced as a moody drifter who commits a murder at a private residence, but spares the life of the maid, Shino (Saeda Kawagushi), after causing her to collapse with fear through physical threat. It transpires that Eisuke and Shino are actually former co-workers from a failed provincial farm, and she goes through the motions of assisting the police with his capture, but withholds crucial information as she feels an unspoken bond with her attacker and desires to understand the reasons behind his violent urges. Whilst shadowing the detective assigned to the case (Fumio Watanabe), she writes letters to Eisuke’s schoolteacher wife Matsuko (Akiko Koyama), urging her to expose her husband for the socially dangerous and sexually deviant criminal that he is.

Oshima utilises jarring jump-cuts and high-contrast cinematography to enhance both the narrative tension and the closely guarded psychological nature of the intrinsically bonded protagonists. The opening sequence, in which Eisuke’s mood shifts from conversational, to brooding, to aggressive is unflinching in its depiction of male violence, while flashbacks to the fateful events at the communal farm comment on the failed idealism of the period. Oshima adopts an aesthetic approach that achieves a sustained sense of claustrophobia, particularly in the later scenes between Shino and Matsuko wherein cutting and framing become increasingly tight as emotions heighten and revelations are made. ‘Sometimes cruelty is unavoidable’, is Matsuko’s grimly accepting summary of her life with Eisuke. Oshima’s film also suggests that such cruelty is unexplainable, as a concluding confession by Eisuke insists that, even if the earlier events had not occurred, he would still have carried out his crimes. Although at times frustrating in that its constant cross-cutting between time frames and multiple perspectives makes it difficult to follow narrative and thematic threads, Violence at High Noon nonetheless achieves a level of formal experimentation that is uncommon in such sobering accounts of moral decay.

John Berra

See also The Sun’s Burial, Night and Fog in Japan and Naked Youth by the same director.

Format: DVD

Release date: 9 June 2008

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Julien Leclercq

Writers: Julien Leclercq, Nicolas Peufaillit, Franck Philippon

Cast: Albert Dupontel, Marie Guillard, Marthe Keller, Alain Figlarz

France 2007

94 mins

Imagine a time in the near future when memories could be transplanted to another human brain, or removed entirely. That simple premise is the key idea behind Chrysalis, the directorial debut from Julien Leclercq. Taking obvious elements from Blade Runner, the recent Bourne films and A Clockwork Orange, Chrysalis tries to fashion them into something new. While it comes close in some rare moments, overall it simply rehashes some of the most memorable scenes from much more memorable films. Flirting with cyberpunk and film noir elements but refusing to commit, Chrysalis is an initially interesting prospect that ultimately just goes through the motions.

Visually very slick, it is also particularly well acted, and the performances of the talented cast go some way towards covering up some of the weaknesses of the script. Albert Dupontel compellingly smoulders throughout. Alain Figlarz makes for a physically monstrous villain. Marthe Keller completes the line-up with possibly the most difficult role of the film as the grieving and morally twisted Professor Brugen. Dupontel and Figlarz are particularly good in the action scenes, both actors impressively performing all their stunts. The two extended fights scenes between their characters are real highlights, recalling the Bourne films (Figlarz worked on some of the stunts for The Bourne Identity). But unfortunately for the cast, the script is entirely underwhelming and an ill-judged plot ‘twist’ midway through the film reveals Chrysalis to be nothing more than an under-developed soap opera.

Director Leclercq makes the most of his sparse sets and skilfully uses CGI effects to create washed-out, stripped-down sets, with only his reliance on interiors hinting at the film’s low budget. Leclercq obviously has a strong eye for visuals, but sadly with Chrysalis he fails to mesh them with a human story. First-time directors often try to throw everything into their first film, but it feels like Leclercq is holding back here. There are moments that hint at a stronger director, and the opening fifteen minutes in particular have a real energy to them; but very soon the plot descends into cliché. With no less than four different writers working on the script, there really is no excuse for such a thin plot, but then again it is possible that this is precisely the reason for the lack of a coherent direction.

At the outset it looks like Chrysalis will be exploring the processes of the memory – what it is and how people are defined by it. Unfortunately, any complex ideas are dropped in favour of keeping the ‘memory’ aspects as a simple plot point. Chrysalis is never a dull film, but it lacks the imaginative spark that would push it above the mass of half-baked sci-fi thrillers. The strong cast and slick visuals keep the audience interested for the duration of the film, but ultimately – and ironically – it’s unforgivably forgettable.

Martin Cleary

Format: DVD

Distributor: ICA

Release date 28 April 2008

Director: Astra Taylor

USA/Canada 2005

71 mins

Among Slavoj í…½ií…¾ek’s many occupations, celebrity academic should, as this documentary makes clear, be ranked first. In perfect post-modern fashion, he has been criss-crossing the globe for twenty-odd years, delivering his offbeat but witty thoughts and provocative theories on ideology, global politics and late-capitalist economics to a growing fan club.

Astra Taylor’s debut film í…½ií…¾ek!, which is now released on DVD, makes a bold attempt to explore the phenomenon that is í…½ií…¾ek by trying to document both his public and private life. That the film fails to reveal much about the latter says more about the personality of its protagonist than any of the scenes that show him proudly displaying his son’s toys or shopping for DVDs in New York.

In Sophie Fiennes’s too rarely seen three-part TV documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, í…½ií…¾ek embarked on a highly energetic Lacanian ride through cinema, which included some wonderfully ruthless low-budget re-enactments of famous scenes played by the bustling philosopher himself. By contrast, Taylor here opts for a rather modest, if straightforward, approach to her interviews with í…½ií…¾ek. With her presence limited to a few minor walk-ons, í…½ií…¾ek is given the time to chase his racing thoughts wherever they go, which seems to leave the young filmmaker at a loss for what to do with her exuberant subject. Whether lecturing, analysing Lacan’s body language on TV, showing us around his house or philosophising naked in a hotel bed, there is undoubtedly something compulsive and calculating in the way he appears before the discreet camera.

However, í…½ií…¾ek appears mindful of his role at all times, and the strongest idea to emerge from the film is his own sense that the intellectual must stand precisely apart, seeking neither endorsement nor personal peace. His big worry, he admits, ‘is not to be ignored, but accepted’. Although he is always deadly serious about his subject matter, he clearly loves to baffle his audience as much as to challenge them. Nothing is sacred for í…½ií…¾ek and absolutely everything is potential fodder for the high-energy stream of thought that runs through his mind, spawning one digression after another until the philosopher seems as unclear as the viewer about the point he was trying to make.

To her credit, Taylor recognises the irony in trying to capture the true spirit and soul behind the exposed persona. The documentary footage therefore is interspersed with animated anecdotes by Molly Schwartz, thrown in to help the viewer enter the í…½ií…¾ekian universe. But with its tight editing and brief running time (71 frantic minutes), the film feels almost too short, and occasionally í…½ií…¾ek seems to have been cut off mid-thought. Which is a shame since – despite his blustering demeanour – his typically drawn-out digressions reveal a very sceptical sadness in his criticism of modern society. Nevertheless, Astra Taylor’s spot-on profile shows the extent to which í…½ií…¾ek is both intimidated by the responsibility his celebrity brings and irked by the impact it has on his intellectual standing. Watching this fresh, brief and enjoyable documentary on DVD is brilliantly stimulating and prompts one to think further about í…½ií…¾ek’s original, politically incorrect and ultimately vital analysis of society.

Pamela Jahn

Format: DVD (Region 1)

Release date: 28 October 2003

Distributor: Plexifilm/Caroline

Director: John Coney

Writer: Joshua Smith

Cast: Sun Ra and his Arkestra

USA 1974

82 mins

Sun Ra is not only one of the key musicians of the 20th century, with echoes of his work heard in Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Coltrane, Sly & The Family Stone, Funkadelic, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and in almost any kind of music that involves some form of paroxysmal sonic experimentation, but is also an Afrodelic thinker who elaborated the radical concept of space as an otherness opposed to time. Sun Ra is an ever-expanding galaxy (his discography is still growing 15 years after his death), his soulful spaceship creating otherworldly musical visions, still (tele)communicating through music (the label ‘free jazz’ in this case couldn’t be more fitting) as he had intended, while inter-planetary mavericks of all times come on board.

Ra first came to Oakland in 1971, where besides playing he was also lecturing in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Berkeley, after being invited by Bobby Seale to stay with his Arkestra in a house provided by the Black Panther Party. That same year Ra was approached by Jim Newman, a producer at San Francisco’s public television station KQED, who suggested shooting a short fictionalised documentary about his music with the aid of director John Coney. Ra immediately saw the opportunity to share his experience visually with a film audience. Space is the Place was the result, and it is one of those wonderfully strange filmic adventures that now seem impossible.

John Coney’s film is as ineffable and mysterious as Sun Ra’s music. Deliberately conceived as an homage to the cheesy aesthetic of 50s and 60s science fiction (films like Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M), its visuals collide with Ra’s cosmogony in an explosively transcendental filmic experience. The idea behind the film was to create a cinematic vehicle for Ra’s mythology, linking the extra-terrestrial theme with the erudite Egyptian alchemy that played such an important role in the musician’s philosophy. Following mythical archetypes, Ra is challenged in the film by The Overseer (played by Ray Johnson, who appeared in Dirty Harry), a sort of superplaya halfway between Black Caesar and Iceberg Slim before his redemption, the epitome of everything keeping black Americans chained to the System’s gravity force, orbiting in the only positions open to them (pimps, drug dealers, etc.).

Landing in 1943 Chicago in his music-fuelled spaceship, Ra cacophonically disrupts The Overseer’s world, using his concept of alter-destiny to question the pimp’s vision of the black people’s future. The film’s set mutates into a dream-like desert where the fate of the black race is played out in a cartomancy duel between Ra and The Overseer. The duel is simultaneously performed on planet Earth where Ra’s Garveyite message faces The Overseer’s promise of easy money and commodified sex, at the expense of social progress for the black population.

Unlike the coeval Blaxploitation school (with the exception of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, The Spook Who Sat by the Door and a few others), Coney’s film shows the pimp for what he is, a degenerate power figure mirroring the decadence of the society he thinks he’s defying. Although aesthetically cognate to Blaxploitation films, Space is the Place explores racial issues by subverting established categories such as the black avenger and the good-hearted pimp and/or drug dealer, articulating a black cinematic popular discourse initiated by Van Peebles with Sweetback but never taken any further. After Martin Luther King’s failed efforts for peaceful integration and Malcom X’s more belligerent stances, taken up by the Black Panthers and drowned in blood by the FBI/CIA, Sun Ra takes the struggle for liberation to outer space; but just like on planet Earth, his work is undermined by two agents, allegedly working for NASA, but probably undercover FBI agents.

The film delivers a polyrhythmic optic experience that may now be reduced to mere aestheticism but back then was the sign of a subterranean social and cultural current willing to transform potentiality into opportunity in spite of the marginal position of black people in Nixon’s America. Filmed in 1972 in the same film studio as Behind the Green Door, with which it shares an actor (Johnny Keyes), but only released in 1974, this mytho-poetic celluloid manifesto demands to be seen and heard for its depiction of a conceptualized outer space where black people would finally be able to tune in with the universe.

Celluloid Liberation Front

The summer print issue of Electric Sheep is a jazz and cinema special to coincide with the re-release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a heart-rending, soulful monochrome gem. To celebrate the belated recognition of one of American independent cinema’s greats, we look at the influence of jazz on film in the US with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Beat cinema among others. For more information on stockists and subscriptions, please contact amanda [at] wallflowerpress.co.uk.