CIFF 25: Christine Turner’s Sun Ra Documentary Attempts the Impossible

It’s appropriate that the new documentary on free jazz pioneer and intergalactic deity Sun Ra begins with commentary from Fred Moten, a professor of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch. Moten frames the film by reminding us that there is no one persona that is Sun Ra, and that what this documentary will attempt to capture is something, perhaps, uncapturable—the endlessly dynamic and ever-changing performance art piece known as “Sun Ra.” In this way, the impossible task in the title of the new documentary Sun Ra: Do the Impossible by Christine Turner, now playing in the Black Perspectives and Documentary programs at the 61^st Chicago International Film Festival, might refer most to the very idea of attempting a documentary about the man, the myth, the space angel himself.

What Sun Ra: Do the Impossible does so well is showing how much performance—in the most multi-faceted and afro-centric sense—defined the life of Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount, aka “Sonny.” Born in Birmingham, AL in 1914, Sun Ra was “transmolecularized” in 1938 when he was transported to the planet Saturn, only to descend as a space-age angel with a mission to transform the consciousness of earthlings through sound, dance, poetry, and relentless free expression. He was jailed at the age of 27 for being a conscientious objector at the start of WWII and eventually made his way to Chicago where the moniker “Sun Ra” was born.

Turner’s documentary is a particular gift for audiences at this year’s CIFF, as the emergence of Sun Ra is an essential Chicago story. The documentary ties his early days in the city speaking on the soap boxes of South Side’s Washington Park to becoming one of the first black artists to own their own label, Saturn Records. The slew of albums written and recorded at that time in Chicago by Ra and his Arkestra—or The Solar Myth Orchestra, or His Cosmo Discipline Arkestra, or the Blue Universe Arkestra, or the Myth Science Arkestra, or the Jet Set Omniverse Arkestra—left a body of work that continues to keep audiophiles fascinated and frustrated. As a music lover who has attempted to engage with Ra’s catalog from time to time, I can attest that it’s no casual affair, and the documentary does a great job of characterizing that fact. From the opening scenes of Sun Ra playing some loose jazz on piano and reciting poetry in voiceover that gently glides into Ra riffing on his favorite melody, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one is aware that they’re dealing with a musical mind likely to diverge in any direction—swing, be-bop, traditional, progressive, or as one commentator in the film notes: “music that doesn’t sound like music.”

While the film will be a sonic treat for audiences in a surround-sound atmosphere, I might have enjoyed a few longer stretches of musical performance (as with the recent Led Zeppelin documentary, which I liked a lot less than Do the Impossible, but has a couple of great extended musical sequences). Turner’s approach overall is not one trying to innovate the music documentary format, nor does it need to be to capture something poignant about such an enigmatic subject, which it ultimately does. (And, notably, contains zero footage of the film’s interviewees getting into place for their interview—a minor and annoying documentary trend that shouldn’t be worth mentioning, but one I hope is officially behind us). Yet, one has to wonder what a stranger approach to an eminently strange subject might have looked like. Or, perhaps, something more like Bret Morgen’s approach to documenting another musical space alien a few years back in Moonage Daydream, David Bowie, which strives more for a Bowie experience, with no commentary on the subject other than from the man himself.

There’s a refrain in Sun Ra: Do the Impossible that has to do with “reality touching myth,” which is also how Ra characterized the moon landing in 1969. In an excerpted scene from his infamous film Space is the Place (1974) he visits a black youth community center in full space-age regalia, and even though the kids giggle a bit at Ra’s flamboyance, he solemnly communicates to them: “The only hope now is a lie. What I call myth.” Space is the Place was Ra’s attempt to expand his spiritual and performative mythologizing into the realm of cinema, since he had already created a world that was curated and costumed, involving music, poetry, dance, activism, and the intellectual assertions of a true auto-didact. Turner’s film well covers Ra’s intellectual impact, as well as his pioneering disregard for masculine norms…or normativity, in general. In a sense, the “reality” aspect of documentary work is touching the “myth” of Sun Ra in this film but might have done better to create an extension of Ra’s own mythologizing. I say this with high regard for Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, with no doubt that much care was put into the stylistic approach of the film, which has an incredible concision and wealth of discovery for clocking in under 90 minutes.

Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is ultimately best as a tribute to his musicians, to the scholars and thinkers who adopted his afro-futurist thought, and as a document of his journey through the avant-garde realms of Chicago, New York, and beyond. The film occasionally drifts into segments that feel as if they might dig into the dirt a bit—perhaps lean into some “VH1 Behind the Music”-esque bits of manufactured conflict—but any criticisms from his fellow musicians or friends all seem within the realm of reason for someone as driven as Ra. Was his Arkestra a bit cult-y? Sure, at times. Did he get a little upset from time to time about money? Check. Was his sexuality a hovering question? Absolutely. To the documentary’s credit, it doesn’t try to exploit these questions and treats them as just another part of the ongoing performance that was Sun Ra—“Not part of history, but part of the mystery.”