Movies: Amiri Baraka

Sun Ra was born on the planet Saturn some time ago. The best accounts agree that he emerged on Earth as Herman Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, although Sun Ra himself always denied that Blount was his surname. He returned to Saturn in 19...

The story of how Everett Leroy Jones became Amiri Baraka, from his childhood to the mid '60s, is told through interviews recorded in the late '90s....

This video portrait, filmed in the days leading up to Amiri Baraka’s appeal of his 90-day sentence for resisting arrest following an argument in his car outside the 8th Street Playhouse movie theater, documents Baraka at his radio show, at home with ...

The film explores the memory and the legacy of the 60s counterculture through interviews with NY political activists, artists and people on the street. The mosaic of voices heard in the documentary creates a public site for memories, reflections and ...

One in a series of 13 documentaries on renowned American poets produced by the New York Center for Visual History. Described by director St. Clair Bourne as “a narrative performance documentary,” this category-defiant film on the life of poet and wri...

Documentary about Charles Olson, exploring his life and the significance of Gloucester, Massachusetts....

Renowned Black writer James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battlegro...

With Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Ray Bremser, Le Roi Jones, Peter Orlovsky, this film takes place in the Living Theater, 1958....

Out of the underground archives and the emblematic figures of these avant-garde movements, featuring Steve Ben Israel of the Living Theater, the puppet creator Peter Schumann, the photographer Alain Dister, the American black dramatist Amiri Baraka a...

Beginning as a city-symphony of Newark streets, buildings, and people set to wordless chanting, The New-Ark quickly arrives at its political imperatives: Black Power must be accomplished through nationalism, and "a nation is organization." The film f...

A short, formerly missing document of Amiri’s time in the Bay Area working with the Black Panthers and San Francisco State University’s Black Student Union....

A suite of rarely seen, unreleased films by the poet, activist, and scholar Amiri Baraka....