Spatialities in cinema: bodies, movements and crossroads

Abstract

In the utopian fable Space is the place (John Coney, 1974, USA) Sun Ra and his band Arkestra undertake an intergalactic journey, land in Tierra, specifically in Chicago and Oakland (United States) and start their recruitment tour from blacks to a physical and symbolic displacement, with the objective of inhabiting other territories. Filmed and released at the beginning of the 1970s, the film had no repercussions at that time. Later, with VHS and DVD, the film became a cult, a famous line among moviegoers and critics and became one of the icons of Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery, in the 1990s, “to address them artistic creations that, through science fiction, invent other futures for the poblaciones negras de today”. I revert to this film due to its spatiotemporal constitution and its particular modes of figuration, which call attention to sound-topological-mental articulations that result in more than formal freedoms, in modes of apprehension and constitution of image and sound, articulating perceptions and sensations, around the construction of the meanings of the film.