It’s a classic kind of movie title phrase, and a good way to start a fairytale or burnish a myth.
We’ve had “Once Upon a Time” in the West, in America, in Hollywood .
In August 1972, the filmmaker William Greaves invited luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to gather at Duke Ellington’s townhouse and reflect on its legacy. Greaves, with a small camera crew including his son, David, planned to shoot the event on 16 mm for a film called “From These Roots. It doesn’t merely resurrect the Harlem Renaissance. It’s more about the act of resurrecting the Harlem Renaissance: the need to remember it, to argue over it and to cherish it. The film is less an act of preservation than a lively and dynamic reminder that history is an ever-unfolding continuum. It’s also just a cocktail party — a really, really amazing cocktail party. We occasionally hear Greaves’ voice from behind the camera or catch him in a mirror. But the film is largely observational, floating between conversations as the attendees discuss the meaning and nature of the intellectual, artistic and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps’ definition is shared by the spirit of “Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The movie could hardly be more specifically set, on a single day. Some of those in attendance include Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen; the writer-artist Richard Bruce Nugent; the painter Aaron Douglas; the socialist and bookstore owner Richard B. Moore; Lee Whipper, actor and founder of the Negro Actors Guild; pianist Eubie Blake; and the scholar John Henrik Clarke.
In that way, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” stretches over more than a century of time. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a miracle of a movie, thus has an intoxicating time-capsule feel, like a ‘70s documentary classic that time somehow forgot. The film’s final images are of children outside in the street, a parting glance that propels “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” into the future. “Once Upon a Time In Harlem” is most moving when the swirl of the party momentarily retreats and the excerpted words of the poets and the writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Cullen speak with a depth of meaning that the free-flowing conversation of the gathering — for all its thoughtfulness — can’t match. This is also dazzlingly true of Whipper, a grand and eloquent presence then in his mid-90s who eagerly recites, from memory, his speech from the 1943 film “Mission to Moscow.”
In dialogue and breadth, the documentary stretches across the years that lead up to the Harlem Renaissance and reverberates across both its contemporary ’70s time and today, when Black history is under considerable threat .
