Movies: Amiri Baraka

After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pursuit of the American dream met in New York City. Associated through mutual friendships, these cultural dissidents looked for new ways and means to exp...

This is a video record of the Buddhist Wake ceremony at Allen Ginsberg's apartment. You see Allen, now asleep forever, in his bed; some of his close friends; and the wrapping up and removal of Allen's body from the apartment. You hear Jonas' descript...

Because jazz is the miraculous product of the horror of slavery, Youssou N'Dour returned to the slave route and the music they created, in search of new inspiration. Accompanied by the blind Swiss pianist Moncef Genoud and the Director of the Gorée H...

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....

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...

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 ...

A short documentary subject made for National Educational Television's Black Journal television program documenting a political rally in Newark, the 1970 mayoral campaign of Ken Gibson, and an African-American voter registration drive with special mu...

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

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 ...

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...

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....