We spend our lives swimming in an ocean of footage. Crimes, meals, ugly cats, parachute jumps, public rudeness, private sex — seemingly everything is now recorded and shared with the world. It wasn't always so. It's a thrill when someone uncovers footage of great people from the past whose achievements feel almost mythological.
This is part of the magic of Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a new documentary that had its beginnings in 1972, when filmmaker William Greaves hosted a cocktail party at Duke Ellington's townhouse. As his guests, he invited the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance, the blossoming of artistic and intellectual life that took off after World War I and flowered into the mid-1930s.
Greaves filmed the occasion, but never made it into a finished movie. Half a century later, his son David — one of the cameramen at the party — took that footage and completed the job. The result is a wonder, like watching a 50th college reunion set on Mt. Olympus.
Here is a party packed with legends, some born not long after the Civil War, nearly all blessed with a sense of style. They range from 85-year-old musician Eubie Blake and painter Aaron Douglas — known as the father of African-American art — to poet Arna Bontemps and photographer James Van Der Zee, whose gorgeous black–and-white stills are interspersed throughout. It's an imposing crew. As Blake jokes, "To be here with all these intelligentsias, I'm afraid to open my mouth."
Greaves' camera follows his guests as they mingle and drink, capturing eddies of chitchat filled with terrific stories, personal preening, and jokes about Marcus Garvey. Artist Romare Bearden boasts that his new book is becoming a bestseller; Ida Mae Cullen frets that her late husband, the poet Countee Cullen, is being neglected. Even as actor Leigh Whipper, 96, talks about working in minstrel shows, the elegant society editor Gerri Major recalls being spat on by a white patron at the Cotton Club.
David Greaves and his editors give all this talk unobtrusively nifty themes and echoes. For instance, Blake says that, contrary to popular opinion, it's not true that he won't shake hands with a white man. He just won't extend his hand first. Later, we hear a story of how Bill "Bojangles" Robinson stuck out his hand to shake with Charles Lindbergh after his famous flight, only to have the racist aviator turn away from him. And this gets its payoff when Bearden points out that the greatest artistic tribute to Lindbergh was none other than the Lindy Hop, a dance created ... in Harlem. To music, I would add, by Eubie Blake.
Langston Hughes, who died before this party, was a leading light of the Renaissance, and preached — as Arna Bontemps tells us — that Black artists should claim a new freedom. Greaves himself was born in Harlem in the late '20s and dreamed of being an actor — even studying the Method alongside Marlon Brando. But realizing that Black actors wouldn't get good roles, he turned to making documentaries, and directed scores of films during the Civil Rights era that captured the lives of actual Black people who were vastly more diverse and interesting than the fictional ones on stage and screen.
You feel his sensitive touch in Once Upon a Time in Harlem, whose guests are no monolithic troupe of geriatrics. These are sharp individuals of great distinction, with the big egos and big opinions that come with that. They still argue, sometimes angrily, over 1920s questions that remain vexing in the 2020s. Should Black artists see themselves as Black Artists or American Artists or just artists? Should Black thinkers tell the truth as they see it, or try to promote the race? "If I can't do something that's going to help us," the journalist Major says, "I'm not going to do something that's going to hurt us."
The film is rich with inspiring sections, from its discussion of the importance of women to the Renaissance — Zora Neale Hurston's dazzling brilliance is duly celebrated — to moments when you feel the valiant souls of those we're watching. Few things are more stirring than seeing activist Richard B. Moore, who initially comes off a bit cold, spontaneously recite by heart Claude McKay's sonnet, "If We Must Die," a poem that ends:
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Early in the film, we hear from Regina Andrews, a librarian who helped encourage and promote the Harlem Renaissance. She says of that legendary time, "It was hard not to be caught up. You got pulled along in a way. You just couldn't stop yourself." Watching Once Upon a Time in Harlem, I got pulled along, too.
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