In the documentary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” the legendary photographer James Van Der Zee eyes the grand piano sitting in the living room of Duke Ellington’s townhouse. We hear a voice nudge him to play. “Off the record,” the unparallel portraitist says. “I haven’t touched the piano in four or five years now.” Then he sits and calls forth a sweet melody.
The scene proves an early indicator of the many pleasures to come in director David Greaves’ inviting and, it turns out, vital film, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. That moment with Van Der Zee is just the first of many in a documentary brimming with the wry and the wise, the thought-provoking and the deeply entertaining.
In 1972, the pioneering documentary filmmaker William Greaves — maker of the iconoclastic hybrid documentary “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” and the clear-eyed portraits for PBS of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells and Ralph Bunche, as well as host of the landmark news show “Black Journal” — invited leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance to Ellington’s home on St. Nicholas Ave. The guests comprised a who’s who of that period in the 1920s and 1930s, when writers, actors, intellectuals and activists made Harlem a cultural hub of Black creativity and cultural ambition.
Ten years after his father’s death and six decades after this remarkable convening, David delivers this glimmering gift, made in collaboration with his father but also honoring his father’s legacy with something that resembles a calling forth of the ancestors. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
The film moves fluidly between scenes of the party (which lasted three hours), separate interviews and archival images with illuminating elegance. The visual rhythms of the film (edited by producer Anne de Mare and Lynn True) capture the vibe of a salon where ideas spark stories and memories concur or beg to differ. Many of the guests hadn’t seen each other since the ’20s, and it doesn’t take much to imagine that in this cordial space, real differences still reside.
Noble Sissle, writing partner to pianist-composer Eubie Blake, sings some lines from their groundbreaking, hit musical “Shuffle Along.” Other theater-makers include Leigh Whipper, founder of the Negro Actors Guild; Abram Hill, founder of the American Negro Theater; and theatrical producer Irvin Miller. The guest list goes on, as the anecdotes revel and reveal.
Blake tells a story about the dancing great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson attending a celebration of the pilot Charles Lindbergh. Robinson reached out his hand only to be rebuffed. The lesson Blake shares: Never be the first to extend your hand to a white man you do not know. Gerri Major, one of the first society page editors, sums up her journalistic ethic at the time: “If I can’t do something to help us, I don’t want to do something that would hurt us.”
Presiding ghosts waft in and out of the conversations: Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Claude McKay and Paul Robeson among them. Marcus Garvey enters the discussions repeatedly. Regina Andrews who was a young librarian at the 135th Street Library, recalls a party for author Jessie Fauset. Poet Arna Bontemps, his silver hair swept back, recalls walking into that same library for the first time and meeting Andrews and her fellow librarian, who recognized him, although he’d only just published in The Crisis.
Artist Ernest Crichlow recalls traveling as a young teen from Brooklyn up to Harlem and the sculptor Augusta Savage’s basement studio. It is the recollection of a gobsmacked teenager, and everyone listens. “I went down into that cellar … and it was like heaven,” he says. “There was Augusta Savage on a model stand, and Robert Pious was painting a picture.” When he ends the story, someone pleads rather demandingly, “Please, someone talk about Zora Neale Hurston. ” And Bruce Richard Nugent does just that.
While the folklorist-anthropologist-author of “They’re Eyes are Watching God” died in 1960, there are plenty of multi-hyphenates at the party. Capturing a character can take time; Greaves distills them. There’s artist-author-songwriter Romare Bearden, quietly taking it all in. Moore argues the clashing politics of the time more than once. Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen, seizes an opportunity to make sure he gets his due.
As the punch flows, the guests warm. They often talk over each other, not out of rudeness so much as the inspiration that comes when you hear a sparking idea, a thrilling recollection. The room’s volume raises a tick. It is a party, after all. As Harvard professor Nathan Huggins speaks, Nugent stands near nodding his head, holding his drink and offering snippets of complementary commentary.
Early in the film, the indelible Nugent captures something easy to forget about being a participant in a moment that becomes an epoch. “While you’re living it, it is the now.”
Although the film owes its intimate gestures to cinema vérité, the effect feels different from being a fly on the wall. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” turns viewers into time travelers but also invited guests, rightly grateful to be in the room. For some of us, this film might evoke the wonder of a great-grandchild listening in on grown-up reminiscences. Nodding at the substance. Smiling at the style.
And the style has its own substance, here. Whipper’s black western bowtie, Andrew’s dangling jade earrings, Major’s oversized, geometric, black-framed glasses, Nugent’s red turtleneck sweater. Costume designers take note. The same goes for Ellington’s abode, with its walls of framed photos. And if none of the guests thought it as they departed, down the stairs and onto the streets of a Harlem that teems with life, but also looks dramatically different than the one they lifted up in the 1920s, we can: “What a room.”
English (US) ·