William Greaves shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, probably his best-known film, in Central Park, where he had a rotating cast act out a melodramatic overheard-in-New York scenario for his camera. He himself was also filmed by a second crew, capturing his interactions with curious bystanders and truculent actors, while a third crew filming whatever they wanted, including arguments with a mutinous production staff which then spilled over into the editing suite, where conversations about the nature of the film, the truths of fiction and the untruths of documentary continued, and were duly included in the final cut. Shot in the summer of 1968, the film was released in 1971, and remains a gloriously contentious in-the-moment document of New York City.
The following summer, in August of 1972, Greaves headed uptown. The resulting film, finally completed by his son David (credited as director) and granddaughter Liani, set its sights on the past, in an effort to record an on-the-fly oral history of the Harlem Renaissance, but is no less argumentative, polyvocal, and unruly.
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Greaves’ conceit was to invite a number of surviving luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance – painters, musicians, journalists, activists, theater impresarios, and patrons of the arts – who contributed to the great flowering of Black American cultural and political life in upper Manhattan during the 1920s and ’30s. Though hosted in Duke Ellington’s townhouse, the great jazz bandleader was not present; many of the attendees were, at the time, teetering on the precipice of obscurity, which motivated Greaves’ effort – as he explains in a note included at the beginning of the film, Once Upon a Time in Harlem was undertaken in a spirit of “co-creation,” acknowledging the importance of the entire milieu behind the few geniuses who eventually become synecdoches for it.
They range in age from mid-career scholars to the then-95-year-old Leigh Whipper, who was born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, and whose career spanned from minstrel shows to Hollywood — he played Haile Selassie in Mission to Moscow and can still recite his lines with whipcrack diction. The past comes to life through copious archival material — nightclub films, street and portrait photography, old newspaper and magazine clippings from Black newspapers like the Defender — but also because the attendees recite poems, committed to memory, by the likes of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
Greaves films the attendees filing in, saying hello to old friends; photographer James Van Der Zee plays a few notes on Ellington’s piano, which triggers the first archival photos, a reverie wafting into the room on a melody. Greaves’ crew peels off several subjects for one-on-one interviews, and eventually gathers them around the punchbowl, the director prompting them with questions about the evolution of jazz, or the relationship between art and politics. As they share memories of inspiring mentors and long-gone characters, they’re as likely to compliment each other – Aaron Douglas’ integration of traditional African aesthetics into book covers and large-scale murals, or librarian Regina Andrews’ cultivation of the creative foment around the the 135th street branch of the New York Public Library – as to interrupt another speaker to praise, almost indignantly, a person or movement that hasn’t been mentioned yet. The importance of every name dropped is understood implicitly, but never taken for granted; this, more than a few racist incidents that remain indelible in the hippocampus make clear the stakes of remembrance.
Despite using boom microphones instead of sticking a lavalier on everyone as they walked through the door, Greaves and his crew still pick up crosstalk as the Renaissance veterans argue over the legacy of Marcus Garvey, or in the case of the still peppery widow of the poet Countee Cullen, advocate for particular legacies. (Some of the women, such as “Society Editor” Gerri Major, also wear massive jewelry pieces that point both backward to Garvey and forward to the Afrocentrism of the 1980s and 1990s.) The edit employs jazzy ’70s split-screen to offer multiple perspectives of conversations and convey an impression of the story as up for grabs, of history as living.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem was made during another profound moment in both New York City and in Black history and culture. The film’s opening and closing montages situate these lions of the past squarely in 1972, juxtaposing archival footage with the iconography, from the Apollo Theater to graffiti-scrabbled stoops, familiar from the Blaxploitation cinema that, in the churning wake of the Civil Rights era, took a far less poetic approach to urban striving. Youth is something like a structuring absence in the film: The nature of the link between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement is a subject of debate, and there are very few fresh faces at the party – more in the background, in caterer’s uniforms, than dressed up to visit Ellington’s townhouse. Greaves, then 35 years old, is a conspicuous presence when he pops up onscreen, less because he’s the director than because he’s a mid-career artist evidently eager to ask questions and soak up knowledge. That he, like his subjects, is no longer with us, makes Once Upon a Time in Harlem doubly precious, as a capsule of two times.
