The Magic City
Film in progress
Directors : Guillaume Maupin and Pablo Guarise
Duration : 80 minutes
Year of production : In developpement
Support : CNC, Procirep Angoa
Co-producer : Naoko Films
On May 22, 1914, Herman Poole Blount arrived on Earth in Birmingham, Alabama. He would later become known as Sun Ra, one of the most extraordinary and prolific jazz musicians of the century, and the founder of a strange cosmic philosophy.
At the time, Birmingham, nicknamed "the Magic City," was an industrial southern city marked by segregation. Despite its seemingly hostile environment, it was here that Sun Ra laid the foundations of his mystical thought and music, seeing in his city an incredible world filled with signs. He left Birmingham at the age of 32 for Chicago, only to return to die there in 1993.
A portrait of the artist as a young man as well as a portrait of a city, The Magic City tells the story of Sun Ra's early years in this universe-city, which is both political and magical, ordinary and fantastical, unsettling and fascinating.
Sun Ra is often remembered for his flamboyant, mystical-cosmic personality, and indeed, this is central to his work. We intend to explore this flamboyance, this marginal force of escape, this composer of new perspectives. However, we quickly realized that Sun Ra's still marginal place in the history of jazz and music is often due to observers who focus on the tree while missing the forest. A forest that is dense, enchanted, yet unsettling because one can easily get lost in it, and it is said to be vast. However, Sun Ra's body of work clearly stands as one of the most important of the 20th century, as it masterfully reconciles total exuberance with extraordinary coherence, philosophical depth with a nuanced understanding of the stakes in popular music. Our fascination with Sun Ra led us to the desire to make a film about this musician. Let us introduce ourselves:
Guillaume Maupin : Musician, cinema programmer at Nova, and filmmaker, I am a staunch advocate of Sun Ra’s importance to anyone who will listen. This long-held desire to make a film about him has been with me for years. My work on re-contextualizing and setting Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to music allowed me to explore the racial question in the United States, American music, and the role of the "Alien" in all its Anglo-Saxon connotations. In my feature Water Music, I had fun following the course of a river that renews itself yet is never the same, whether it’s made of water, jazz, rock, or the folklore that shapes people.
Pablo Guarise : My fascination with Sun Ra echoes my work on stories where reality and myth intertwine, taking viewers on journeys through unusual cities with fantastical narrators and wild constructions. In The Disappearance of Tom R., I embarked on a bottomless investigation, while in A Room in Poland, I sought to portray a wondrous and labyrinthine Warsaw.
To date, there is no film that attempts to approach Sun Ra from a biographical perspective. It quickly became clear to us that trying to exhaustively cover the life and work of such a behemoth would be a monumental task beyond our reach. To approach such a multifaceted character, we needed to select a narrower and more relevant angle, one that would engage enthusiasts while also serving as an entry point for newcomers. For while Sun Ra's body of work and influence remain vast and sometimes impenetrable to us mere humans, they have, if not a beginning, at least a point of departure, a guiding post.
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