NYFF 64: "Once Upon a Time in Harlem," William Greaves threw a party like no other

by Cláudio Alves

Here at The Film Experience, we love to celebrate centennials, and yesterday marked a big one. On October 8th, 1926, William Greaves was born in Harlem, and would go on to become one of the most important figures in 20th-century American non-fiction filmmaking. More specifically, his legacy rests on documenting African-American life, spanning from avant-garde exercises like the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm duology to more conventional fare like his Ida B. Wells profile for the American Experience series. And though he died in 2014, Greaves’ cinema lives on in ways that defy convention. Through the efforts of his son, director David Greaves, and granddaughter, producer Liani Greaves, the great cineaste is gifting us a new film from beyond the grave. 

Indeed, he is inviting you, the viewer, to a most exclusive cocktail party at the home of the one and only Duke Ellington. It’ll be a gathering of artists and intellectuals, the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. Or it was, for this happened already, in August 1972, when said party took place and the director recorded it all. From that wealth of footage comes Once Upon a Time in Harlem, left unfinished for half a century before it was completed and premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Neon bought the rights then and will release it theatrically next week, on October 16. In the meantime, this ghostly party from a bygone era, remembering an even older day, has been doing the festival circuit, spellbinding audiences wherever it goes, including TIFF and the NYFF…

As many great films do, Once Upon a Time in Harlem guides you into how to approach it from an early stage. It does it more directly than you might expect, though, blunt and poetic in one go. “In an effort of co-creation, I propose to create a series of great films on great people, all of whom are metaphors, creations of the Godhead” – an artist's scribble, an announcement of intent relating to William Greaves' whole oeuvre. But regarding the specific case of Once Upon a Time in Harlem, to whom is this note? Well, surely to David Greaves, who was to complete his father’s work. In some other ways, it’s an instruction on how to understand the film that we, the audience, are about to see.

A film co-conceived across generations by two artists, bound by blood and legacy - one who planned and directed and shot,  one who recorded parts and assembled the rest - this work contains the act of dialogue in its very essence. It’s in the film’s DNA. In that regard, I’d like to use this moment to uphold the younger Greaves’ authorship of the film, even if not of the entire footage (he was one of the cameramen, and that must be acknowledged, though). The cut, the collision of image, is the matter of cinema, the most fundamental part of it even in its absence. It’s not story or narrative or sound.

It’s the Deleuzian time-image above the Deleuzian movement-image. It’s Soviet theory proven across a century after it was first formulated. There would be no Once Upon a Time in Harlem without the younger generations of the Greaves family or their post-production partners in crime. There would be no conversation to be had if these artists hadn’t first looked at the materials of fifty-four years prior and let themselves be engaged. Think of Once Upon a Time in Harlem as a set of open arms, ready to welcome you into a home and a community, a room and a history, warm but not entirely soft and relaxed, or unconditional in their giving nature.

Because what the camera finds among the living legends of the Harlem Renaissance is not a monolith, drunk on nostalgia and perfect unity, but a plethora of views on a variety of subjects, including the worth of the people in the room and those who, sadly, couldn’t attend on account of being dead. They come about in talk, sometimes malicious gossip – poor Florence Mills catching strays – and in disconnected bits of archival footage from outside the party, documents and recordings from their lifetime. Even so, contradictions abound in this congregation of luminaries and their ghosts.

The writer Arna Bontemps grew to think of the Harlem Renaissance as a prism that reflected all of the Black experience, from past to present, and says it so. To further his point, we have playwright and librarian Regina Andrews talking about the impossibility of not being pulled into the Renaissance as it was happening, a feeling that could be seen as extending beyond the boundaries of time and ended epochs. Richard Bruce Nugent suggests that, while they were living it, none of these people, now aged out of their supposed prime, could have imagined what it would ever mean.

When you’re in the now, you don’t think about it being perceived in a faraway tomorrow as an old and important before. William Patterson of the International Labor Defense will say the Renaissance will never end, while, minutes later, Countee Cullen’s widow, Ida Mae Roberson, insists upon having her voice heard and the gathered crowd embrace notions of legacy lasting after us. But dissenting voices rise, too, and sometimes they’re not so combative as they are disappointed, tired, defeated. The historian Nathan Huggins wants to believe nothing dies to the disagreement of many. 

For instance, actor Leigh Whipper believes the youth of 1972 already forget the past, that they don’t look back at it or consider how it paved the way to where they are now. His weariness reverberates through other figures present at the party, but it’s never better expressed than by the thespian himself. It permeates moments that ought to feel disconnected from the grievances of an aging artist. It’s in his voice as the actor recites the monologue he performed for 1943’s Mission to Moscow, playing the then Emperor of Ethiopia.

More evident still when, invited to take over the film with another recitation, he opts for a poem of greater, intimate meaning. The Harlem Renaissance is alive, perpetuated by the works and labors that immortalized their makers. The Harlem Renaissance is dead, killed by an over-attachment to key figures and erasure of the collective. The Harlem Renaissance is both, neither, and everything in between, the sorrow in this orator’s mellifluous voice and the joy in contemporary audiences getting to hear it out of an archive many believed would never see the light of day for decades.

The Harlem Renaissance was a moment in history, but history isn’t a morgue. Right? Perhaps I’m leaning too hard on one side of the argument, the one that includes current Black artists in a continuum and gives credence to this film as a conversation across time, contracted and transformed by the machinery of cinema. Perhaps, it’s just how the editing of Once Upon a Time in Harlem intends me to think, for Greaves, even the late statesman who, 71 minutes into this cut, allows himself to intervene directly in a conversation.

He and those who followed in the documentary's assemblage seem more hopeful than dejected, more interested in seeing the past as a vast, fertile ground for new things to grow from rather than as a fenced garden you can observe from a distance but never add to or take from. Denial of history is denial of the self, so history is the self, is us, today, tomorrow, forever. And history is memory, just as cinema is, and this film is about a party where memory is as intoxicating as the strongest libation shared between friends.

The look of it reflects such sensations, for there’s a honeyed comfort to the images that makes you feel as if you’re at the party, considering these people through the bottom of a cup full of brown liquor. Interview portions set around the house, as if Greaves had absconded with some of the partygoers for a speedy one-on-one, are even more warmly lit, though dim around the edges to better differentiate them from the collective and sustain the illusion of an intimate address to the audience through the camera and the mighty barriers of time.

In the party proper, Greaves rarely isolates people, preferring to always include others’ reactions to what is being said by a fellow friend or acquaintance, perchance a rival. The way some people eye each other across another’s monologue can be as rewarding as the spiel itself. This interest in the energy of the room as a place electrified by the communion of opinionated people doesn’t only present in the cut and construction of “scenes,” mind you. The compositions themselves carry this idea, with master shots aplenty and close-ups that always seem to include the faces of others in the background or foreground, fragmented or as whole as the take’s putative subject.

And when the material doesn’t allow for this plurality, it’s time to bring about the split screen, disruptive as that stylistic move might seem at first. After a while, it makes sense for Once Upon a Time in Harlem, like many devices that made me balk at first, to second-guess the acclaim laid at the film’s feet since its world premiere. Part of me still wishes this let itself just be a documentation of the party, more Amazing Grace or Original Cast Album: Company than Summer of Soul. Though, one must acknowledge that it could never be a fly-on-the-wall exercise, as the camera’s presence is eminently addressed and acknowledged.

Then again, have you ever been to a party full of raconteurs raconteuring their past? It’s always a performance, and it’s still as true as anything you can put before the movie camera. The inserts I’ve already described sometimes break the flow, sure, but not enough to sink the film. Would this doc be better cinema if it restrained itself from using archival images that pull the viewer away from the party's physical space and leaned on illustration rather than pure remembrance? Maybe, but it would be less inviting to viewers with different levels of knowledge about the artworks and era being discussed, and this is a film that wants to be nothing if not inviting. 

It’s those open arms again, that warm, welcoming embrace that allows for prickliness but not too much. And is that so bad? An over-critical little voice in my head insists so. Still, the experience of Once Upon a Time in Harlem is too engaging, inebriating and ecstatic for me to listen too intently to the contrarian within. I’d rather listen to William Greaves read his own "In summertime in quiet wood", as guests leave, as history melts into the present, old footage fading into new, the same streets full of life, full of possibility, the possibility of a people, a movement, a renaissance.

Don’t miss Once Upon a Time in Harlem in cinemas if it's playing anywhere near you. This is one of those films you want to see with a crowd, the collective of the dark room’s audience meshing with the collective on that bright wall, window to the past.