The Tamesis
Some documentaries explain their subjects. Others let their aura do the talking.
Sun Ra: Do the impossible“The Movie,” directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Kristen Turner, falls firmly into the latter camp. It feels entirely appropriate for a figure who defies succinct definition: composer, bandleader, philosopher and mythmaker who blends cosmic symbolism, ancient Egyptian imagery and interstellar imagination.
Turner’s elegantly distilled portraits debuted last year at the Tribeca Music Festival and are now streaming as part of a PBS show Mastersrecast Sun Ra as a visionary musical polymath and fundamental architect of Afrofuturism rather than an eccentric footnote in avant-garde jazz—his influence now permeating the realms of fashion, art, and sound with new urgency.
Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham in 1914, Sun Ra went on to produce more than 200 albums, expanding jazz into territories most listeners had never imagined. His career spans more than 50 years, from the swing and bebop music of the late 1930s to the radical explorations of free jazz and electronic music from the 1960s to the 1980s. (He died in 1993.) Turner brings together a kaleidoscope of archival footage, performance clips, still photography, and interviews with members of his Arkestra and contemporary thinkers to chart Sun Ra’s long cultural afterlife.
“If people like Sun Ra, then they like Sun Ra more than a little bit,” the San Francisco filmmaker said with a laugh. “People who were really attracted to him talked about how authentic he was. He was fearless in the way he presented himself, and I think he often attracted other outsiders for that reason.”
In fact, his imprint spreads outward, from the interstellar swagger of OutKast and the robotic futurism of Janelle Monáe, to the mysterious poise of Erykah Badu and the sculptural, otherworldly aesthetics of Solange, Grace Wales Bonner and Pharrell Williams. Each conveys Sun Ra’s radical reconstruction of black identity, his insistence on myth as survival, and his refusal to be limited by earthly expectations—a philosophy epitomized when he famously claimed Saturn as his origin, a way of imagining black existence beyond the limitations of the earthly world.
