“Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” playing at the M.V. Film Center starting on Friday, Nov. 6, invites us into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. The documentary offers reminiscences and opinions from those still alive in August 1972, when filmmaker William Greaves called a large group of the remaining luminaries to Duke Ellington’s home.
Greaves’ son, David Greaves, completed the documentary 50 years later, using his father’s footage and archival photographs that bring the earlier era to life. The Harlem Renaissance, named after the New York City neighborhood, was a major Black cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement that flourished from roughly 1918 through the mid-1930s. Fueled by the Great Migration, which brought hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners to Northern urban centers, the movement brought a massive surge of creativity in literature, theater, visual arts, and music — especially jazz and blues.
In one of many poignant moments in the film, poet Arna Bontemps recites his famous poem, “The Day Breakers,” which he tells us talks about his contemporaries in Harlem at the time:
We are not come to wage a strife
With swords upon this hill.
It is not wise to waste the life
Against a stubborn will.
Yet would we die as some have done:
Beating a way for the rising sun.
Although key figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Augusta Savage, and Marcus Garvey were no longer alive, at the film’s start we watch Ellington’s home fill with the likes of composer and pianist Eubie Blake, painter and muralist Aaron Douglas, artist and author Romare Bearden, painter and writer Richard Bruce Nugent, and photographer James Van Der Zee, to name just a few. At first, polite conversation dominates: old friends catching up. Eventually, the guests gather as one, and different allegiances and points of view emerge, offering us nuanced insight into the disparate experiences of those involved.
Guests drink, laugh, share memories, and argue, but they are united in recognizing the Harlem Renaissance’s importance. “Art comes out of community, and it comes out of audaciousness,” Bearden says.
Perhaps the remark by Regina Andrews, a librarian who hosted many social gatherings of the key artists and intellectuals at the time, sums it up best: “There was no way not to be caught up [in it]. In fact, you were pulled along in such a way, you couldn’t stop yourself.”
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” screens at the M.V. Film Center starting on Friday, Nov. 6.
For tickets and information, visit mvfilmsociety.com.
