Photographer James Van Der Zee studies the grand piano in Duke Ellington’s townhouse. Someone asks him to play. “Off the record,” he confesses, “I haven’t touched the piano in four or five years now.” Then he begins a melody.
It’s a quiet opening to one of the great pleasures of “Once Upon a Time in Harlem”: watching people remembered for what they made, wrote or painted become — in one another’s company — people again, complete with hesitations, jokes, opinions and stories they’re still eager to tell. The documentary doesn’t embalm its subjects as historical figures or march them out as evidence of their own importance. Instead, it just lets them stay human.
The year is 1972, and filmmaker William Greaves has brought together artists, actors, writers, activists and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance, some of whom have not seen one another since the 1920s and ‘30s, when Harlem stood at the center of African American art and political thought. Greaves, whose work includes “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm,” documentaries about Ida B. Wells and Ralph Bunche, and a tenure hosting “Black Journal,” filmed an evening with conversations that would remain unfinished as a movie during his lifetime. His son David, one of the camera operators that night, has now directed the completed documentary.
David Greaves’ most consequential choice is restraint. Working with editors Anne de Mare and Lynn True, he resists imposing a conventional historical structure on footage that was never meant to behave like a classroom lesson. The camera moves through the room as conversations form, drift and occasionally collide, giving the guests space to respond to, and sometimes talk over one another. Archival images provide necessary context without taking command of the film, while the editing preserves pauses, interruptions and shifts in subject that another filmmaker might have cleaned away.
That looseness is both the film’s risk and its strength. There are moments when “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” appears to wander, but imposing a tidier chronology would betray what makes the material extraordinary. Memory does not arrive alphabetized or in perfect order, and neither do old friends. The film gradually establishes its own rhythm, one governed less by dates than by personality: a story prompts another story, a name awakens a memory, and disagreement opens another door. What might have looked shapeless in less confident hands becomes the very structure of the experience.
Stories from the room
The range of lives gathered inside Ellington’s townhouse is remarkable. Among those filmed are artists Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, Ernest Crichlow and Romare Bearden; composers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; actor Leigh Whipper; poet Arna Bontemps; photographer Van Der Zee; librarian Regina Andrews; activists Richard B. Moore and Louise Patterson; historian John Henrik Clarke; and journalists Gerri Major and Ted Poston.
Those names establish the historical magnitude of the gathering, but resumes are not what make the film breathe. Its vitality comes from the exchanges between these people — their timing, humor, irritation, affection and certainty about their own recollections. The Harlem Renaissance is not presented here as a completed chapter with an agreed-upon meaning. It remains contested territory because the people who lived it did not all experience it in the same way.
Blake recounts a story about Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who attempted to shake Charles Lindbergh’s hand at an event in the pilot’s honor and was rebuffed. Robinson’s advice, as Blake tells it, was never to be the first to extend your hand to a white man you do not know. The incident is painful, but Blake’s telling gives it another dimension: humiliation becomes instruction, carried from one man to another and preserved through memory. The film is especially powerful in moments like this, when history arrives not through narration or explanatory text but through a story someone has carried for decades.
Gerri Major speaks with equal clarity about the responsibility she attached to journalism. “If I can’t do something to help us, I don’t want to do something that would hurt us,” she said. Greaves does not underline the statement or surround it with commentary. He understands that its plainness is its force.
Other recollections return the Harlem Renaissance to its libraries, parties and studios. Andrews remembers a gathering for author Jessie Fauset. Bontemps recalls entering the 135th Street Library and meeting Andrews and another librarian who recognized him, though he was not yet famous and had been only recently published in The Crisis. Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey enter the conversation through the guests’ memories, each name pulling another piece of their shared world back into the room.
Crichlow remembers traveling from Brooklyn as a teenager to sculptor Augusta Savage’s basement studio. “I went down into that cellar … and it was like heaven,” he said. “There was Augusta Savage on a model stand, and Robert Pious was painting a picture.” The memory still carries the awe of the teenager who first walked into that room. Later, someone calls out, “Please, someone talk about Zora Neale Hurston.”
Nugent answers.
That simple exchange captures what “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” does exceptionally well. History is not formally introduced as a subject because it does not need to be. Someone remembers someone else, and suddenly the absent person is back in the room.
As the evening continues, the guests become comfortable enough to interrupt and contradict one another. Their familiarity gives the documentary its intimacy, while their disagreements keep it from becoming the sort of ceremonial tribute in which everyone has been polished into agreement. Those contradictions are not an obstacle to understanding the Harlem Renaissance; they are part of understanding it. The people gathered here are not merely remembering history. They are still negotiating who gets to tell it and what, exactly, it meant.
For me, there is pride in seeing this community together, but an even fuller pleasure in watching its members remain unmistakably themselves: opinionated, funny, observant and unwilling to surrender their own versions of the past.
History in the present tense
That is where “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” becomes more than an extraordinary archival document. Its achievement is cinematic as well as historical because the film restores the social texture surrounding its celebrated names — the jokes, loyalties, tensions, recollections and disagreements of people who knew one another before history had finished deciding how they would be remembered.
David Greaves could easily have treated his father’s footage as sacred material requiring solemn presentation. Instead, he trusts its spontaneity. That choice gives the documentary its warmth and immediacy. We are not merely told that these people knew one another; we see what knowing one another looked and sounded like. The rough edges of the gathering become part of the film’s argument: history was once ordinary life, lived by people who did not know which of their conversations, friendships or disagreements would one day be studied.
One of the most profound observations in the film — words that linger long after the screening — comes from Richard Bruce Nugent: “While you’re living it, it is the now.”
In that single thought lies the film’s deepest achievement. Greaves’ guests are not preserved as figures trapped inside a historical moment; they remain alive within it, speaking, laughing, disagreeing and remembering. Their presence becomes perpetual rather than frozen, and the camera gives us access not merely to what they once were but to the immediacy of who they were while they were living.
That is also why the survival of this footage matters. Preserving the stories of our ancestors requires more than reverence; it requires work, patience and, sometimes, another generation willing to finish what the previous one could not. William Greaves did not live to complete this film, yet the images survived, and David Greaves carried them forward. Memory, when it is tended to rather than simply admired, becomes its own form of immortality.
These women and men were living in their present just as we are living in ours, and through “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” their present continues to move alongside us.
That is profound. And, in the truest sense of the word, groovy.
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” opens theatrically in New York on Oct. 16, and in Los Angeles on Oct. 23, with additional markets to follow.
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” is a William Greaves Productions presentation made in collaboration with Louise Archambault Greaves, with support from the Cromwell Harbor Foundation, Ford Foundation’s JustFilms and the Mellon Foundation. Cinetic Media handles world sales. David Greaves directed; Liani Greaves and Anne de Mare produced. Anne de Mare and Lynn True edited; Tamar-kali composed the music. The camera crew included David Greaves, Doug Harris, David Hoffman, and Jerry Panzer.
