Brain Farts, Musings, and Random Acts of Bafflement (Lightly Sautéed) by Spencer Sundell
The LIFE magazine photo archive hosted by Google has “millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time…”
All fully searchable, of course, or you can just browse like the folks at the WFMU blog, who’ve kindly compiled choice links to myriad photo treasures to be found there.
Tonight I stumbled upon a pithy and entertaining (if sporadic) anonymous history blog called Historians’ Corner, which has some fascinating stuff about the Alsos secret mission at the end of World War II.
About a year ago, the blogger posted a couple times about his trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC. In “Washington DC Trip - Day 5″, he uses photos to walk us through getting obscure old declassified war records at NARA. An earlier photo post documents his visit to the Library of Congress. (I’ve always wondered what it looked like in there.)
What an official US Government box of declassified secret documents looks like:
What part of the Library of Congress looks like:
For further background, please see my previous posts here, here, and here.
Following is the official English translation from pages 120-121 of the catalog for the 2007 Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto). I have added a few links where relevant; comments in [bracketed italics] are my own. The full bilingual (Italian/English) catalog can be downloaded from the Pordenone web site (PDF, 2.9 mb).
Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange are the co-directors of Lobster Films in Paris. David Shepard is president of Film Preservation Associates in California which, among other things, owns the old Blackhawk Films collection.
Bible Land Films
This is the story of a cinema miracle — which is also still a mystery. All we have are a few clues pointing towards an explanation. In March 2007, one can of film, with the name “Collection ELGE”, appeared in the window of an antique shop. With the kind complicity of Sabine Lenk, we went behind the window, and in the shop we found 93 small rolls of Edison-perforation 35mm nitrate camera negative, some in ELGE cans, others in Lumière cans. The shrinkage was greater than 6%, but the rolls were not decomposed. And on the first frames of each were written in India ink such amazing titles as Baydar Nazareth, Fontaine à Bethléem (Fountain in Bethlehem), Panorama de Tibériade, and Jésus en Croix (Jesus on the Cross).
The rolls bear numbers from 1 to 203 (many are missing), and those recovered include films rejected due to technical defects. We brought them to the Haghefilm Conservation laboratory, where they were printed onto 35mm fine grain positives, allowing further identification. They are proving one of our most exciting and important discoveries.
At this writing, some films and locations remain unidentified. Most of the negatives have small perforations with square corners, as do most Gaumont films from 1897 to 1903; however, some of those with the highest numbers have perforations with beveled corners.
The dozen films in Lumière cans reminded us that as of 1897 Lumière was selling Edison-perforated film. The cans indicating technical rejects reminded us of Gaumont’s unusual trading process. Before 1900, Gaumont provided independent cameramen with raw stock and equipment, in return for the right of first refusal to purchase whatever they photographed. The rejected films remained the cameraman’s property. This explains why the first Gaumont catalogues contain films made by Georges Hatot, Albert Londe, or P. Gers.
In his 1925 book, Histoire du Cinématographe des origines à nos jours, film veteran Georges-Michel Coissac, director of the religious publishing house Maison de la Bonne Presse, names another 19th century cameraman who provided films to Gaumont: the mysterious Albert Kirchner. We know very little about him, but we do know that in 1896, Kirchner, professionally known also as Léar, made religious lantern slides for Masion de la Bonne Presse, as the French Catholic church was very interested in visual education at this time. Léar also filmed for pioneer filmmaker-producer Eugène Pirou the striptease from Louise Willy’s stage play Le Coucher de la mariée (The Marriage Bed), and probably many other erotic and risqué films, and, with Father Bazile, made knock-off versions of such popular Lumière films as L’arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled / Watering the Gardener [watch it on YouTube]), La bataille d’oreillers (Pillow Fight), and so forth.
We also know that in January 1897 Albert Kirchner filed a patent for a camera called the “Biographe Français Léar”. One of these instruments may still be seen in the collection of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Amateur versions of the Biographe Français Léar were produced and sold by Léar (as well as by Jules Demaria under the name “Pygmalion”). That same year, Léar claimed two other camera patents, although these seem never to have been produced, and established a partnership with Paul Anthelme, a former agent of Pirou, and a Mr. Pacon, a wealthy printer. In the spring of 1897 Kirchner/Léar left for Palestine with Father Bailly, a priest who would supervise the religious aspects of the first life of Christ to be filmed on location.
Coissac’s book and Stephen Bottomore’s entry on Léar in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, indicate that in early 1897 Léar and Father Bailly photographed many films in the Holy Land, among them perhaps the first motion pictures taken in Egypt, Palestine, and today’s Israel. Coissac names a few titles: Vues du Caire (Views of Cairo), Débarquement à Jaffa (Embarking at Jaffa), Entrée des pèlerins dans la ville Sainte (Pilgrims in the Old Section). Coissac added that as Gaumont obtained 35mm cameras only in November 1897 (their previous output was on 60mm), they decided by the very end of that year to buy all the Kirchner/Léar negatives, to be able to provide 35mm films as quickly as possible. In the Gaumont catalogue of 1898, we find views of Cairo, Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulchre (also included among our negatives). Actually, Léar also took a lot of other views, probably intended for sale to Pathé and other companies.
Among the films shot by Léar we find Les dernières cartouches (The Last Cartridges), number 93 in the Gaumont catalogue; not far from that number, 56 to 67 are views of Cairo and Palestine. Were all of these Léar films? Here’s another clue: on some of our films, we see at the edge of the frame, or for a few seconds, the silhouette of a priest. Could this be Father Bailly?
Among the films we discovered are complete episodes of a Passion du Christ (Life of Christ), including variant takes for some tableaux. In the summer of 1897, Léar, in collaboration with Coissac, completed his Passion by photographing more scenes in Paris, with actors from a tableau vivant version.
This first film version of the Gospel story was widely shown. In February 1898 it formed part of an illustrated lecture given by the Rev. Thomas Dixon, the future author of The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, upon which D. W. Griffith based The Birth of a Nation. That same year, Léar opened a short-lived cinema in the basement of the Olympia theatre in Paris, and it seems that he also sold his negatives to Gaumont, which would explain the ELGE cans now in our collection.
The end of Kirchner’s life also remains a mystery. Another famous cinema veteran, René Bunzli, writes in the margin of his copy of Coissac’s book that Léar died in an asylum shortly afterwards. But if so, who was running the firm Léar & Company in Cairo, which was prosecuted in 1901 for exporting pornographic pictures to Europe? So many questions, for one sure fact: if our conjectures are wrong, these films remain an unsolved mystery.
– SERGE BROMBERG, ERIC LANGE, DAVID SHEPARD
Some Speculation Concerning Father Bailly
As noted above, a “Father Bailly” accompanied Albert Kirchner on his trip to Palestine in order to “supervise the religious aspects” of the filming of scenes from Christ’s life. Perhaps if this priest could be identified, further clues about these films might be found even through some tangential, non-cinema archive or reference.
As we’ve seen, Kirchner was associated with Masion de la Bonne Presse, which was founded by the Augustinians of the Assumption (aka the Assumptionists). According to Wikipedia, Father Emmanuel Bailly served as superior general from 1903-1917. I theorize this may be the “Father Bailly” referred to above.
It is apparent that this Father Bailly was a traveler, as I found Google references to letters he sent to France from Rome in the late 1800s. According to this web page (which I auto-translated using Google Translate) in 1900 a “Father Bailly” led a congregation of French Assumptionists on an Easter pilgrammage to Nazareth in Palestine, where he apparently gave a powerful sermon (if that’s the correct term to use). I’m only guessing, of course, but it seems probable to me that this was Emmanuel Bailly — if he was prominent enough in the order to become the superior general three years later, it seems likely that he would be entrusted to lead an Easter pilgrammage to far Palestine. This suggests (barely) that he may have traveled there previously…perhaps with Monsieur Kirchner/Léar.
My online research is greatly hampered by the fact that I can’t read French. But I can’t help but wonder if the archives of Bayard Presse (the antecedent of Maison de la Bonne Presse) or an Assumptionist order in France might hold any further clues about the 1897 film expedition that could perhaps positively identify the films recovered by Lobster Films?
As I’ve noted previously (here and here [with stills]), early in 2007 Lobster Films in Paris recovered 93 reels of previously unknown actuality and dramatic footage from various locations in the Middle East, notably Jerusalem and other locales in Palestine, Egypt, and Turkey. Lobster co-founder Serge Bromberg reported that despite their age and the fact they are, of course, on volatile nitrate film stock, the precious films evinced “not a scratch, [and] no decomposition”.
To say these films are of enormous historical importance is definitely an understatement.
Prints of a number of the motion pictures restored by Lobster Films were premiered during the 2007 Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto), held October 6-13 in Italy, in a program entitled “Incunabula: Bible Land Films” (”Incunabula: film dai paesi biblici”). The films of Turkey were not shown.
I was not able to attend the festival, a source of nearly physical pain for me — besides these films, there were no less than 8 films by René Clair (including a screening of À propos de Nice accompanied by freakin’ Michael Nyman), 4 films by Georges Méliès recently rediscovered in Barcelona, a presentation by no less than John Canemaker on the life of Winsor McCay, an extensive retrospective of films by master animator Ladislas Starewitch, and about a gazillion other things I’d give my eyeteeth to have attended. But I digress and wallow…
Precious little information about the newly-rescued 1897 Middle East films is known, even less is (so far) available. So much so (is that a paradox?) that one professor of film studies who actually attended the festival contact me for information. While most (and humbly) flattering, I’m afraid I was not much help.
Even two weeks after the screening at Pordenone, Google reveals almost nothing of substance. Thus far, the only worthwhile discussion I’ve come across is a post to the excellent Bioscope blog run by Luke McKernan, who attended the festival and posted a daily diary while there. But I do not intend to damn with faint praise: McKernan’s post is chock full of wonderful information. (It should be noted that he also co-edited, with Stephen Herbert, the absolutely essential book Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema [BFI, 1996], which I simply cannot recommend too highly. The companion web site reproduces, I do believe, all of the entries in the book — a remarkable move which I applaud them for. I refer to both resources constantly.)
And so, in the interest of further propagating precious information (and my own archiving), I am posting an extended excerpt from Mr. McKernan’s post on the subject. Links within the excerpt below are from the original post unless otherwise noted. Comments in [italicized brackets] are mine, but the post is not otherwise altered. Many thanks to Luke for posting this!
(The catalog/program for the 2007 Pordenone Silent Film Festival can be downloaded from the official web site [PDF, 2.9 MB].)
Update: I have posted the catalog’s entry about the films.
Pordenone diary - day five
By “urbanora” (Luke McKernan)
The Bioscope (blog)
October 15, 2007In March [sic?: my understanding is it was in February] of this year, someone spotted a small can of film in an antique shop window. It had the words ‘Collection ELGE’ on the can, indicating a Gaumont film (from the letters L.G. for Léon Gaumont [link added]). The discovery came to the attention of film historian Sabine Lenk, who in turn alerted Lobster Films of Paris, specialists in early film and inspired discoverers of the extraordinary. What lay within the antique shop, however, hinted at being their most exceptional discovery yet. There were ninety-three cans in the shop, the owner apologising that they were only negatives (!). They were Edison-perforation 35mm, some in ELGE cans, some in Lumière cans, with some shrinkage but little decomposition. And they appeared to date from 1897.
Films very rarely turn up these days from the 1890s, and when they do they tend to be in ones and twos. For ninety-three to emerge in one go is practically unprecedented. And there there was their subject matter. Handwritten titles on the opening frames indicated films taken in Nazareth and Bethlehem, and dramatised scenes of the life of Christ. Before a single film had been printed or viewed, it was clear that here was a truly major discovery.
Seven months on, and amazingly the collection was ready for exhibition at Pordenone. Inevitably enough, this being a collection of early, non-fiction films, the Verdi [theater] was less than full for this historic premiere. So there were folks who preferred their cappuccino to witnessing the most remarkable discovery of the festival, but more fool them. The rest of us heard an introduction from Serge Blomberg of Lobster, who said that the rolls of film bore number 1 to 203, with many missing. The films we were to see came from Palestine and Egypt. Other titles showing scenes in Turkey would be shown at a later date.
And so to the films. They were one-minute or so each in length, actualities of life in the Bible lands (as Lobster have labelled the films), very much in the Lumière style. Indeed, the films showed the sort of studied composition and coherent action encompassed within the frame and completed within the film’s duration that characterises Lumière productions. Some had two shots, some featured camera movement [unusual for the time]. They were all in superb condition. We saw camel drivers, a snake charmer (whose cobras tried to escape into nearby bushes and were hauled back, not best pleased), children dancing in front of the ruins at Luxor, street vendors in Cairo, an Arab street funeral procession, a funfair (illustrated above) with swings pulled by ropes and a mini ‘big’ wheel, women drummers, men dancing, men and women making bricks, women preparing food, a panning shot of the Kedron Valley, women sowing seeds on horse-drawn ‘carts’ (they looked like sleds) outside Nazareth, and many more such scenes. Perhaps most impressive were the two or three films showing the shadouf being operated, the human-powered (usually child-powered) irrigation system with a bucket and a counterweighted arm. These were scenes that had gone on from centuries, millennia even, and here was the motion picture capturing them — in 1897 (or thereabouts), when in truth they could have been scenes from any time.
Following the actualities, we had the dramatic films. There were scenes from two lives of Christ — or at least, filmed in different locations. The first was clearly filmed in Palestine, presumably in Nazareth and Bethlehem themselves. These were brief scenes from the birth and childhood of Christ, extraordinarily featuring an Arab (Christianised?) Joseph and Mary. The Adoration of the Shepherds and then the Magi (not much difference between the two) took place by some steps, with a rough authenticity unlike any Nativity film you ever saw. Mary wore a large white shawl that covered much of her face. We saw further scenes with this couple, Mary on a donkey, the rest on the flight to Egypt, Mary breastfeeding her child, the toddler Jesus’s first steps (not a scene I remember from the Bible).
And then the backgrounds changed. The scenery became wooded, without buildings, and Mary, Joseph and Jesus (a young girl) were now played by white performers, with attitudes and iconography far closer to the conventional. These scenes appear to have been filmed in France, but they continued to surprise. We had an Annunciation scene with an angel Gabriel suddenly appearing (a trick effect unlikely to be as early as 1897), Joseph working at his carpentry, someone dropping a pot which the child Jesus then magically mended, Joseph rowing Mary and Jesus across a river, young girls dressed as angels joining Mary and Jesus. Most astonishing was the film where the child Jesus carried a cross, placed it upon the ground, and then lay down upon it. Then is some precedent for this sort of intimation of the future on the part of the child Jesus in the Western art tradition, but it was still a mind-boggling feat of the imagination.
So who made these films, and how saw them? Although there is not certain evidence as yet, the most likely candidate is Albert Kirchner, also known as Léar. Kirchner was a French photographer and likely producer of risqué postcards, who is first recorded as having made a striptease film, Le Coucher de la Marie, with Eugène Pirou in 1896. Unblushingly moving from pornography to religion, Kirchner teamed up with a Catholic priest and educationalist, Father Bazile, to make short comedy films. In Spring 1897 he set off with one Father Bailly to film in Egypt and Palestine, returning to France to film a twelve-scene Life of Christ with Michel Coissac (a future film historian who wrote about this episode). This was the first-ever Life of Christ to be filmed, and it enjoyed huge popularity — the Reverend Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman on which D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation would be based, exhibited it in America in 1898 — and was much imitated. Kirchner’s films were bought up by Gaumont, and some can be found listed in Gaumont catalogues. He then disappears from the historical record, but he may have died soon afterwards.
There was much excited discussion among the early film enthusiasts after the screening (there aren’t many of us who get wildly enthused by 1890s films, but we’re a dedicated breed). It seems unlikely that all the films date from 1897, given some of the sophisticated techniques on view at times, and we may have seen films produced by different hands. And so many questions. Why the two lives of Christ? Were the ‘authentic’ scenes shown in France, rejected by audiences, and scenes more in keeping with Western taste shot in their place? Or were the two lives really one and meant to be shown together, despite the changes in performers and costumes? Were the actuality scenes meant to be integrated with the dramatised scenes? We know that the films — assuming they are Kirchner’s — were popular, but what exactly did audiences see? It is only a few months since this extraordinary collection was discovered, and there is still a huge amount to be discovered. What is certain is that a gap in the history books needs to be filled, and we have a collection of views of life in Palestine and Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century which will not only excite the historians but enrich generations to come. [Remainder of original post omitted.]
As first reported here in July, 93 reels of motion picture film footage shot in 1897 in Palestine and other Middle Eastern locations were recovered earlier this year by Lobster Films from an antique shop in Amsterdam. Despite being 110 years old, the camera negatives are reported to be in excellent condition.
It was recently announced that the restored films will be publicly exhibited for the first time at the 2007 Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto) in Italy, running October 6 through 13. The program will be titled “Incunabula: Bible Land Films.”
In an email message sent to Festival organizers in March, 2007, and excerpted on the Pordenone web site, Lobster Films co-founder Serge Bromberg said:
…this year, we have something very special to show. In an antique shop, we have discovered 93 wonderful little camera negatives from c. 1897, all shot in the Middle East (Jerusalem, Palestine, Egypt, Tibériade, etc.), that would form an ideal 80 [minute] program of what could be among the earliest films shot in the region still in existence. … They are in wonderful condition … Not a scratch, no decomposition, and those little sprocket holes typical of the films of that year.
The Festival web site includes several photographs of the recovered films, which are included below. No further information about the films is currently available, but watch this space for updates on this historic find.
Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, a film preservation company based in Paris, reports that 93 small reels of motion picture footage shot in 1897 in Palestine has been recovered and are now being restored by the company. The reels are the earliest known surviving film footage photographed in Palestine and represent a significant historic find.
The reels of nitrate camera negatives, in small metal tins, were found in February, 2007, in an antique shop in Amsterdam. Initially it was thought there was only a single reel, however it turned out that dozens more reels were being stored in the shop’s back room. All available reels were obtained by Lobster Films.
Mssr. Bromberg made the revelation during conversation after a screening of his Retour de Flamme program at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on Sunday, July 15.
Though he declined to be more specific, Bromberg said the film footage was not shot for the Lumière company. (Alexandre Promio, a cameraman working for the Lumière brothers, is known to have shot footage in Palestine circa 1896-1897, in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This resulted in at least a few released films, including La Palestina en 1896 and Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer [Leaving Jerusalem by Railway, 1897]. Charles Urban, Thomas A. Edison and the Kalem Company are also known to have sent camera teams to Palestine, though it is my current understanding that this was later than 1897.)
“No, it was not Lumière,” Bromberg said. “It’s a completely different story.” He did not elaborate.
Bromberg went on to say that 13 of the reels have been restored thus far, with work continuing on the rest of the precious footage. The films will be premiered at a film festival later in 2007, he said.
Update: Restored prints of these recovered films will be premiered at the 2007 Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Learn more and see stills here.
Ah yes, I remember it well!
“During a broadcast of the Dr. Who episode Horror of Fang Rock on WTTW Chicago Channel 11, on Sunday November 22nd, 1987, at around 11:15pm, a Video “Pirate” wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and transmitted one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves.
Earlier in the evening on the same day, during the Nine O’Clock News on Channel 9 (yes, a completely different channel [in fact, WGN, owned by The Tribune]) the Max Headroom Pirate also broke in — although it was for a much shorter time and there was no audio.
Needless to say, Dan Roan (the sports reporter) was a bit flustered.
And no, he [the pirate broadcaster(s)] was never caught.”
Further details can be read from the archived Dec. 20, 1987 issue of the e-zine, Tolmes News Service. (Man, I kinda miss e-zines. Don’t you?) There’s also a Wikipedia entry about the Max Headroom pirating incident, according to which there “has not been a broadcast intrusion incident of this kind in America since.” Darn. There’s also a write-up at the aptly-named Damn Interesting site.
Ginormous thanks to my ol’ fellow Chicago expat buddy Hell’s Donut House for bringing this to my attention.
Here’s a partial attempted transcript of the lo-fi, electronically-distorted audio from the person who posted this to YouTube:
“He’s a freaky nerd!”
“This guy’s better than Chuck Swirsky.” [another WGN sportscaster at the time]
“Oh Jesus!”
“Catch the wave…” [reference to a Coke commercial at the time of which Max Headroom was a spokesperson]
“Your love is fading…”
“I stole CBS.”
“Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece printed all over the greatest world newspaper nerds.” [??]
“My brother [mother?] is wearing the other one.”
“It’s dirty…”
“They’re coming to get me…”
Also courtesy of YouTube, here is the CBS network news story about the incident, broadcast the following day (contrary to the added title on the clip, which is incorrect).
As I only just posted about, Chicago’s Whitewalls Press published in the spring of 2006 a thin but essential volume entitled The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, compiled by John Corbett.
Following below is the amazing back-story, courtesy of the Chicago Reader and as written a year ago by Peter Margasak, in advance of what may well have been once-in-a-lifetime series of gallery exhibits, symposia, talks, concerts, and special events — alas all ended in mid-January this year. I just can’t believe I missed these events — this is what I get for not paying closer attention to my former hometown. I would have gladly flown there just to see this stuff (no offense intended to my friends there..though they certainly would understand). Dag blaggit.
Anyway, this article covers territory not addressed in Corbett’s introduction to the book, and provides proof positive that at least sometimes, the master finds the student — sometimes even from beyond the grave. Visit the title link below for some rare photographs. Also, see the end of this post for a link to purchase the exhibition catalog directly from the University of Chicago Press (among other delights).
Finally, note that Corbett expresses a desire to tour the exhibit. Seattle residents should begin pestering the Experience Music Project immediately and incessantly (see also EMP’s contact page) to pester-in-turn the good Mr. Corbett and convince him to bring it here!
Ra Materials
Hundreds of artifacts from Sun Ra’s Chicago years nearly wound up at the dump.By Peter Margasak
Chicago Reader, September 29, 2006ONE AUGUST DAY six years ago, John Corbett got a mass e-mail containing some disturbing news: a collection of artifacts related to the charismatic, radical jazz musician Sun Ra was in danger of landing on the trash heap.
A professional salvager — someone who gets paid to liquidate the contents of houses that are about to be sold or demolished — had uncovered the materials on the job and shown them to a friend who liked “spacey stuff. She immediately recognized that it was some stuff that had to do with Sun Ra,” Corbett says, and began e-mailing around to see if anyone might want to buy it.
Corbett, a music critic, co-owner of the Wicker Park gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, and a teacher at the School of the Art Institute, is a Sun Ra fanatic, but he nearly deleted the e-mail after he read it — he figured that somebody else would save the stash if it wasn’t already gone. But instead he decided to meet with the sender, a former teacher at the School of the Art Institute who Corbett says wishes to remain anonymous. She told him the Sun Ra archive was still there.
The house being cleared out, it turned out, had belonged to Alton Abraham, Sun Ra’s business manager. Abraham had died a year earlier and the house was being sold by his ex-wife, Catherine Baymon. “By the time we got down there it was just three days before the house changed hands,” says Corbett. Baymon had already sorted through the materials and set aside some items she wished to keep. She’d also already disposed of some items that Corbett now thinks may have had historical value. “A lot of great stuff got thrown away before we were there,” he says. “And while we were there a whole wardrobe’s worth of clothes, which probably included a lot of the early costumes, was thrown away.”
But what remained was a treasure trove of Sun Ra ephemera: album art, recordings, writings, ledgers, and scraps of paper like ticket stubs and gig flyers. It’s this material that forms the bulk of an astonishing exhibit that opens Sunday [Oct. 1, 2006] at the Hyde Park Art Center, “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68.”
It wasn’t until Sun Ra and his band, the Arkestra, moved from Chicago to New York in 1961 that the world took notice of the bandleader, pianist, and philosopher. “Pathways” sheds new light on his lesser-known early years. Sun Ra, who died in 1993, spent years crafting an outsize persona, proclaiming himself an Afro-futurist visionary from Saturn who believed that, because planet earth was doomed, “space is the place.” His music was a singular mix of big-band arrangements influenced by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Tad Dameron, free-jazz improvisation, hard-bop rhythms, experiments with electronic keyboards, and African and Latin grooves; his live shows were vaudevillian affairs featuring dancers, fire-eaters, and colorful costumes. But though he was a very active performer in Chicago during the late 50s, he was also an obscure one, playing mainly for small black audiences.
Corbett bought the lot from the salvager (he declines to say how much he paid), and for the past six years he and his wife, Terri Kapsalis, along with a crew of volunteers and advisers, have painstakingly sorted through his purchase, which filled two 10-by-12-foot storage spaces. “You had little eureka moments that were mind-boggling,” Corbett says. “I had the great joy of looking through a box and finding a manila envelope that said ‘one of everything,’ and it contained a huge collection of original manuscripts for Sun Ra’s broadsheets and leaflets that he made in the 50s.” Hundreds of hours of audiotape — including studio masters, readings, rehearsals, and interviews — are now housed in the Creative Audio Archive at the Andersonville nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio. They’re being transferred to digital formats and annotated; once that process is completed, says Corbett, the tapes will be available to scholars and a full list of their contents will be placed online.
Some of that material has already made its way to the public. Corbett has issued two CDs of previously unreleased music, 2002’s Music From Tomorrow’s World and 2003’s Spaceship Lullaby, on his Unheard Music Series label. And in August [2006] local publisher WhiteWalls released The Wisdom of Sun Ra, a fascinating collection of his broadsheets, which combined black nationalist philosophy, biblical allusions, and elaborate — if fantastical and absurd — etymological theories. (”Negroes belong to the race of Mu,” he wrote in one broadsheet. “Another way to spell Mu is moo. Moo means low. That’s the cow’s word. Negroes are Mr. Moo.”)
From the moment he discovered the material, Corbett wanted to keep it together as a singular archive of Sun Ra’s Chicago years, and he hopes eventually to find an institutional home for it. “It only articulates a story if it’s together,” he says. “Little bits and pieces of it are collectorfetish ephemera, but when it’s all together you start to see this interesting phenomenon . . . which is the way that Ra sort of fit into a southside Afro-futurist community of thinkers, designers, and musicians who were all pondering the future, independent businesses, and separatism.”
Corbett first learned about the existence of Sun Ra’s Chicago writings when he interviewed Abraham in 1993 for his ‘94 book, Extended Play [Duke Univ. Press]. But until he came across this material, there was little documentation of Sun Ra’s life in the 50s in the public realm — the sole example of his writings from this period was a broadsheet he gave to John Coltrane. “[The archive] sheds some light and fills in a lot of details,” says Yale professor John Szwed, author of the definitive Sun Ra biography, 1997’s Space Is the Place. “It puts him in the middle of what was being discussed in the parks those days, where there was a real tradition of political and theological discussion.”
The show at the Hyde Park Art Center, which was curated by Corbett, Kapsalis, and WhiteWalls editor Anthony Elms, has multiple parts. “Pathways to Unknown Worlds” features more than 60 pieces of art on the walls and numerous display cases containing Sun Ra-related arcana, such as notebooks and homemade instruments; two multimedia rooms will present a pair of Sun Ra documentaries, a slide show of photos, and two hours of his music, most of it previously unreleased. Elms and Northwestern University art history professor Huey Copeland have organized a second exhibit that opens October 15 [2006], “Interstellar Low Ways,” which collects work by artists influenced by Sun Ra, including legendary Parliament-Funkadelic album artist Pedro Bell, composer Charlemagne Palestine, local cartoonist Plastic Crimewave, and members of the Destroy All Monsters art and music collective. Both exhibits run through January 14, 2007.
In addition, Corbett has organized a two-day symposium on November 11 and 12 [2006] called “Traveling the Spaceways,” where Szwed and other Sun Ra scholars will join artists and art historians to discuss his work. Actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce will read from his writings, and various musicians, including Nicole Mitchell, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Thurston Moore, and Ken Vandermark, will play music by and inspired by Sun Ra. Lastly, on December 3 the Chicago Cultural Center will host a discussion and performance featuring original members of the Arkestra and other associates.
Though nothing has been finalized, Corbett says he plans to tour “Pathways to Unknown Worlds” around the country and Europe as he begins to search for a permanent home for the archive. But for now he’s giddy about finally revealing what he’s been processing for six years. “Finding this stuff was like a lightning bolt hitting me,” he says. “It’s just about the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. It’s been a thrill, and I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.”
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