Screening at Sundance: David Greaves’s ‘Once Upon A Time In Harlem’

Sitting (left to right): Jean Blackwell Hutson, Eubie Blake and Irvin C. Miller. Standing (left to right): Aaron Douglas, Nathan Huggins and Richard Bruce Nugent. Photo: Bruce Stanford, Courtesy: William Greaves Productions

William Greaves, the late documentary filmmaker who died in 2014, drew from a multitude of inspirations in his day, from boxer Muhammad Ali in sports chronicle The Fighter (1974) to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the experimental meta-movie Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968). However, perhaps his most vital work was one he never quite decided how to finish, despite filming it in 1972. Now, after more than 50 years, his son David Greaves brings his father’s greatest feat to stunning completion: the afternoon he spent capturing a gathering of over a dozen luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at the home of jazz pianist Duke Ellington.

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After introducing its posthumous concept (using letters and voice recordings from the late maestro himself), Once Upon A Time In Harlem moves quickly from the historic New York neighborhood into Ellington’s townhouse, where Greaves’s bright lights and 16mm cameras welcome various guests of honor. It’s a murderer’s row of legendary figures: painters like Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Richard Bruce Nugent and Ernest Crichlow; musicians like Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; theatricians like Leigh Whipper and Regina Andrews; the photographer James Van Der Zee; Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of poet Countee Cullen; and so on.

Each of them is introduced with a text slug line that quickly disappears. There are so many pioneers present that it’s hard to keep track as they pour into the party, but thankfully, their names and titles reappear on screen nearly........

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