Koreyoshi Kurahara’s raucous, disorienting and confounding 1964 film Black Sun challenges viewers’ efforts to find meaning. The film privileges our affective experience over our cognitive ability to make sense of what we see and hear. This article explores the dynamic surrounding meaning and affect in Black Sun through a close reading of three connected foci: jazz, Blackness and salvation. It concludes by linking our affective dislocation as a viewer with the fraught and often incommensurable nature of cross-cultural encounters.
William Cummings (Wed,) studied this question.