‘Once Upon A Time In Harlem’ Cannes Review: The Harlem Renaissance Document William Greaves Never Finished Is Worth The Wait

Imagine yourself, dear reader, as part of a circle of friends and acquaintances from your youth — your twenties, your thirties. Suppose that many of the people you met back then went on to become famous. So did you. Add reunion after reunion across the years and decades until, gradually, the gatherings grow further apart, more circumstantial. And then imagine that someone calls you together again, more than half a century after those friendships first took root. You are no longer thirty, or forty, or fifty — you are well into your seventies, eighties, or beyond. Many are gone, and in their place come wives and children. And somewhere in the middle of it all, someone is pointing a camera at the room.

That, in essence, is what filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) did in 1972, when he brought together several dozen surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s home in Harlem. The movement they had built — that explosion of literature, poetry, jazz, and visual art that had shaken American culture to its foundations in the 1920s — had long since passed into history. But the people who made it were still there, or at least some of them were, gathered now to talk, reconnect, argue, drink, sit for interviews, and remember the years when they had first dared to assert the dignity and complexity of Black identity, laying the cultural groundwork for what would later become the Civil Rights Movement.

That footage, captured by Greaves and left unfinished at his death, has now been edited, recovered, and restored for posterity by his son David, who was among the several cameramen present that day. Most of the figures on screen will be unfamiliar to general audiences — their names belong to scholars and devotees of the period — yet their conversations and reminiscences bring vividly to life what it meant to be part of that flowering moment. The gathering includes photographer James Van Der Zee, pianist Eubie Blake, composer Noble Sissle, the widow of poet Countee Cullen — visibly anxious that no one forget her husband — writer Richard Bruce Nugent, painter Aaron Douglas, actor Leigh Whipper, and many others.

What gradually emerges across these conversations — conducted in pairs, in small clusters, and, in the film’s finest sequence, in one long, sprawling exchange involving nearly everyone at once — is something like an oral history of African American culture in the United States: how it erupted after the Great Migration carried Black Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, how Harlem became the place where they thought, wrote, composed, painted, and built something entirely their own. The film was shot more than fifty years ago. The movement it celebrates began fifty years before that. Seen today, Once Upon a Time in Harlem has quietly become a centennial.

Beyond what the conversations reveal about the individuals and their contributions, what the film captures above all is the friendship, the camaraderie, and the gentle competition that still crackles among these octogenarians — some of whom talk over each other to claim credit, share credit, or pay tribute to those no longer present, among them Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes. There are no obvious grudges on display, though the camera occasionally catches a sideways glance that hints at older rivalries. But the prevailing mood is warmth: a little food, some drinks, music in the air, and the quiet celebration of lives that could fill textbooks but that a film like this restores to their full, irreplaceable human texture.