This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick. 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 1974's Space is the Place, Starring and Built Around the Visionary, Experimental Jazz Composer, and band leader, Sunrah. There's nothing else out there quite like it, just like

there has never been anyone else quite like SunRaw. So I'm really looking forward to discussing

this one. Joe, had you seen the movie before? No, I had never seen the movie before. And what a treat.

I loved it. I thought this was great. It was totally unique. I've never

seen a movie like this. Yeah, yeah, it is quite a treat. In its best moments, I think space

the place delivers the kind of avant-garde surrealism that you would find in, you know,

certainly 1970s cinema such as Jodorowski's Holy Mountain, while also channeling

various works of contemporary and classic science fiction.

Certainly early scenes also bring to mind 72's 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 1970s and often something to a dislocation in the early

1970s. Meanwhile, there are other elements, again, of spaces the plays that harkened to movie, science fiction of the 50s and 60s, all of this while providing a platform for Sun Ra to express his own particular philosophy on personal identity, creative liberation, mythology, and above all, the spiritual power of music.

Speaking of music, 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.

I think the earliest idea was let's get Sunrah and his orchestra inside a planetarium,

and they'll do a show, 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.

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