In August 1972, the experimental film-maker William Greaves convened a once-in-a-lifetime dinner party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. The occasion was a celebration and reconsideration of the Harlem Renaissance, the watershed African American cultural movement of the 1920s. The guest list included its still-living luminaries, some of the 20th century’s most influential – and still under-appreciated – musicians, performers, artists, writers, historians and political leaders, all in their sunset years. Over four hours and untold glasses of wine, talk wheeled freely from vivid recollections to consternation, lively anecdotes to contemplations of ongoing struggle. Greaves, by then niche renowned for his innovatively meta documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, lightly directed the conversation but otherwise let the energy flow. He considered it the most important footage he ever recorded.
You could probably release that remarkable footage in full, completely unedited and unstructured, and still have a good documentary; every piece is now, 50 years later – the same distance to us as the Harlem Renaissance was to them – a bridge to a time no living person can remember, each face and gesture informed by decades of aftermath no straightforward nonfiction film on the period could capture. But Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by Greaves’s son David, who was one of four cameramen that day, manages to seamlessly clip and contextualize the party into 100 mesmerizing minutes. It’s both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy.
That this sumptuous footage, allowed room to breathe, exists at all feels like a miracle; that it takes shape here as a coherent, inventive yet straightforwardly informative film is an intergenerational feat. Originally shot but not used for his 1974 film From These Roots, William Greaves always intended to shape the footage – fly-on-the-wall observations and direct interviews – into a Harlem Renaissance retrospective, but fell ill before he could complete it; when he died in 2014, at the age of 87, it passed to his widow Louise, who continued work until her own death in 2023, at the age of 90. Now David, along with his daughter Liani Greaves as producer, serve as stewards of William’s archive, supplemented by grants and community funding.
They smartly stay out of the way, merely adding nametags and archival photographs as footnotes to the discussions at hand. The structure of the film, which premiered at the Sundance film festival, follows the arc of the party; tentative, polite greetings and warm memories eventually give way to impassioned discussions, even arguments – should they still use the loaded word “negro” even though it was demeaning, or convert to “Afro-American”? – as well as tipsy crosstalk, all within a relaxed atmosphere of hard-won camaraderie. Occasionally, the Greaveses include welcome clips of William lightly prompting conversation to the more tentative guests on, say, the revolution that was jazz music. “It would be considered a revolution in relation to other music,” says the painter Aaron Douglas. “It was not a revolution to us”
I am tempted, at this point, to just keep quoting extensively from the many subjects, whose personal histories, stories and inside jokes need no summary. Among them: the musicians Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, whose 1921 musical Shuffle Along was one of the first all-Black Broadway shows; the historians Nathan Huggins and John Henrik Clarke; the poets Arna Bontemps and Frank Horne (uncle of Lena Horne); the actors Leigh Whipper and Irvin C Miller; the photographer James Van Der Zee; the librarians Regina Anderson and Jean Blackwell Hutson; the society page editor Gerri Major and Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of poet Countee Cullen. They speak of departed friends and figures – some long gone, such as controversial Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, and some, such as the poet Langston Hughes, only a few years past. Some, like the 96-year-old Whipper, had parents who were enslaved, their inclination toward the arts a very expression of liberation.
To watch them grapple, in real time, with what happened then and what it means now (the participants being somewhere between their 60s and Whipper’s 96 years old, they amusingly consternate the ignorance of the youths), is a faultless, captivating experience. The Harlem Renaissance, says Major, was the first time Black people were recognized as creative people. According to Bontemps, it was a “prism” of the Black experience from all time. Schuyler viewed it as not a renaissance at all but an “awakening”. Whatever the view, it eventually looped back to concerns of ongoingness – whether the cultural flourishing died on the vine or carried forward into the fraught present. “The Harlem Renaissance isn’t dead,” Huggins argues, “because the Harlem Renaissance lives with everybody.” Fifty years later, every person at the party now gone, Once Upon a Time in Harlem keeps that flame alight.
