Prior to the TIFF screening of Once Upon a Time in Harlem, producer Liani Greaves asked the audience to imagine having the chance to sit down with someone who is no longer with us — a grandparent or a former teacher, perhaps. She then advised us to apply the same level of attention to the people in the documentary as we would that special ancestor.
It’s a lovely suggestion, and remarkably easy to follow: This is a miraculous film, one that not only renders its subjects with vivid intimacy, but manages to temporarily bring them back to life. Walking out of the theatre, it was difficult to believe they were gone and impossible not to feel the gravity of their absence.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem was decades in the making. In 1972, legendary filmmaker William Greaves invited a group of poets, artists, intellectuals and activists from the Harlem Renaissance — a cultural and intellectual movement led by Black Americans that took place roughly between 1920 and 1930 — for a cocktail party at the home of jazz pianist Duke Ellington.
More than 50 years later, Greaves’s son David, who was among the cameramen filming on that day, has collaborated with Liani (William’s granddaughter and David’s daughter) to meticulously assemble the footage into a film. Over the course of 100 minutes, it captures the spirited discussions that took place that afternoon. Dozens of luminaries, many in their 70s, 80s and even 90s at the time of the party, reconnect and swap memories of their halcyon days. Among the most memorable guests are Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, two musical minds behind the groundbreaking 1921 Broadway hit Shuffle Along, pioneering journalist and socialite Gerri Major, and the sprightly actor Leigh Whipper (who, at 96, can easily recite poetry or rattle off long monologues from his early films).
Interspersed with vivid archival footage from the era, the film leaves no doubt about the radical importance of the cultural and intellectual production that occurred in 1920s Harlem, where the proliferation of independent publishers and Black-owned spaces created the conditions for unprecedented levels of creative freedom — a sort of cultural mecca that would eventually be undermined by the arrival of the Great Depression.
According to David Greaves, the film was an attempt by his father to “memorialize the people who formed his intellectual foundations.” And while it certainly achieves that goal, the most riveting parts of the film occur when its subjects engage in lively debate, reanimating the political tensions that may have formed in the 1920s, but persist half a century later. For example, modernist poet and painter Richard Bruce Nugent, a truly colourful character in a red turtleneck, engages in several arguments about whether his contemporaries should be considered Black artists, creating art for their own community, or whether artistic expression is always universal. Another tension that bubbles up throughout the film involves rehashing the politics of Black nationalist and pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, a leading advocate for the back-to-Africa movement. Richard B. Moore, an eloquent civil rights activist, grows animated as he rejects the doctrine of Garveyism in favour of his own socialist commitments.
Indeed, one of the film’s great strengths is that it resists trying to define the Harlem Renaissance or delineate its meaning, instead letting its subjects attempt to hash out that messy question. One guest muses that the Renaissance represented a “prism” reflecting the “Black experience of all time,” while another describes the era as a collection of people dealing with the same struggle, but travelling on different roads. Ultimately, they share the same goal of liberation and the freedom of artistic expression.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a treasure trove of wisdom and beauty, and a poignant reminder of how the past continues to shape our present.
