William Greaves, the late documentary filmmaker who died in 2014, drew from a multitude of inspirations in his day, from boxer Muhammad Ali in sports chronicle The Fighter (1974) to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the experimental meta-movie Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968). However, perhaps his most vital work was one he never quite decided how to finish, despite filming it in 1972. Now, after more than 50 years, his son David Greaves brings his father’s greatest feat to stunning completion: the afternoon he spent capturing a gathering of over a dozen luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at the home of jazz pianist Duke Ellington.
After introducing its posthumous concept (using letters and voice recordings from the late maestro himself), Once Upon A Time In Harlem moves quickly from the historic New York neighborhood into Ellington’s townhouse, where Greaves’s bright lights and 16mm cameras welcome various guests of honor. It’s a murderer’s row of legendary figures: painters like Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Richard Bruce Nugent and Ernest Crichlow; musicians like Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; theatricians like Leigh Whipper and Regina Andrews; the photographer James Van Der Zee; Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of poet Countee Cullen; and so on.
Each of them is introduced with a text slug line that quickly disappears. There are so many pioneers present that it’s hard to keep track as they pour into the party, but thankfully, their names and titles reappear on screen nearly every time they speak. They are described, notably, not only by their chosen professions but by their roles in Black activism over the decades—for instance, the scholar and civil rights leader Richard B. Moore. Their work laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance (in the 1920s and 1930s, though some argue it began earlier), and it belongs to a historical moment in which visible, boundary-pushing African American artistry went practically hand in hand with political action.
Soon, the free-flowing assembly settles into a living room gathering, libations firmly in hand (and after a while, less firmly), marked by whip-smart debates over the group’s contemporaries and its departed elder statesmen (among them, diametrically opposed thought leaders like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois). Through individual sit-down interviews, which function as regal portraits, Greaves allows each distinguished forerunner their own time and space before cutting back to the group discussions. In many cases, with the help of editors Lynn True and Anne de Mare, David Greaves presents both these forms of documentation—the individual and the collective—side-by-side, not unlike his father’s early split-screen experiments.
The result is both endearing and invigorating, as the movie—a time capsule of a time capsule—affords these aged icons the space to ruminate and reflect on key moments of cultural transformation, often in close-ups of teary eyes that gently reveal defiant fervor. Their vivid memories of interacting with late greats like the sculptor Augusta Savage collide with intellectual debates over the works of not only their forebears, but—in hilarious, inebriated moments—each other’s works as well. Harlem Renaissance author Nathan Huggins is particularly taken to task for his perceived analytical missteps, but his retorts are just as compelling.
From a top-down perspective, the film illuminates an oft-flattened diversity within Black academic thought, itself a response to varied approaches to racial and financial inequity. However, Greaves’s formal approach magnifies the meeting’s intellectual contours in alluring ways, revealing the intimate passions and interpersonal histories that not only once drove this movement but also still drive its successors. Some of these subjects last saw each other 50 years ago, while others have kept in touch, but the crisscrossing of their paths has woven a monumental historical fabric that Greaves and his filmmaking descendants bring to light in wistful, powerful fashion.
Stark photographs from before and during the Harlem Renaissance, of vicious crimes committed against Black bodies, and of young would-be freedom fighters gazing at the viewer from a century prior, are paired with narrated poems by the likes of Cullen and Langston Hughes. The era’s mood and zeitgeist are granted three-dimensional life by these artistic pairings, practically an act of curation by the film and its creators. Meanwhile, at the party, older members of the group, like then-nonagenarian Whipper, recall their childhoods during Reconstruction, their parents’ lives under slavery, and, in happier moments, the songs, poems and cinematic monologues they learned and performed decades earlier.
That they remember these as if it were yesterday creates a tangible continuum across time—a bridge between our present, the filmed past captured by Greaves on celluloid, and the recalled pasts of the film’s participants, which appear either as early black-and-white footage or as verbal recollections. The film reminds us that these seemingly distant events—the inspired art movements from a century ago and the horrors that fomented them—exist practically within living memory. It allows us to reach out and almost touch them.
That Once Upon A Time In Harlem can finally be seen is owed to the tireless efforts of director David Greaves, his stepmother Louise Greaves (who passed away in 2023) and preservationist Bill Brand. However, William Greaves remains the movie’s vital creative force. Watching it today, it’s hard to shake the feeling that he knew it would become a document of the distant past, someday in the future, a temporal relationship that informs his aesthetic approach.
The film may be erudite in nature, but its visual language is anything but austere. Greaves positions his cameras, and thus places the audience, not at a distance from these debates, as casual observers, but rather, within them as participants (much like Mati Diop’s recent African art restitution chronicle Dahomey). That we can hear Greaves’s voice, and that we glimpse his sound equipment from time to time, makes him just as much of a participant, especially in the knowing moments when he departs from topics of analytical debate and requests the movement’s most revered keepers reach deep into their bags and pull out delightful party tricks, in the form of impromptu performances.
That we’re seated around the same center table as the guests, often at or below their eye level, positions us practically as children sitting at their grandparents’ feet, watching them narrate childhood stories, eagerly awaiting the moments in which they brim suddenly with youthful zeal while revealing emotional, artistic and intellectual energies we didn’t know they still possessed. Few experiences in one’s early life are as formative or as moving. Greaves ensures that his engineered gathering (and rigorous intellectual exercise) will tug at the heartstrings by framing an otherwise academic past through the language of nostalgia.
No matter one’s distance from the Harlem Renaissance, Once Upon A Time In Harlem transforms its cultural milieu into personal memory, suffusing history with enormity and reinvigorating it for generations to come.
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