Fifty Years After the Party, a Lost Harlem Renaissance Film Arrives

By Tom Whitfield

In 1972, the director William Greaves filmed a cocktail party in Duke Ellington's apartment with four 16mm cameras. Fifty-four years later, the footage finally reaches theaters as Once Upon a Time in Harlem, now in limited release through NEON.

Greaves, helped by two Schomburg Center librarians, Jean Hutson and Regina Andrews, gathered surviving Harlem Renaissance figures that day: the painter Aaron Douglas, the photographer James Van Der Zee, the writer Richard Bruce Nugent, the actor Leigh Whipper, and others. The plan was a documentary. It never appeared in that form.

The reason was aesthetic. Greaves found that his still period photography did not match the live-action footage. He folded the stills into the 30-minute 1974 documentary From These Roots; the party footage sat unused for decades. Greaves died in 2014. In 2022, his widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, obtained a Ford Foundation grant to digitize and assemble roughly 60,000 feet of film. Before she died a year later, she handed the project to David Greaves — one of the camera operators in 1972 — and his daughter, Liani Greaves, who completed it with editor and producer Anne de Mare.

The reception has been strong. New Yorker critic Richard Brody called the finished film "one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction" that he's "ever seen."

What does the son's version keep?

David Greaves leans on his father's experimental vocabulary. Split screens, in the manner of William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, carry the overlapping conversations of the salon.

"Symbiopsychotaxiplasm gave us the license to do whatever we wanted," David Greaves told The Film Stage in an interview at NEON's Manhattan office. "You wanna have slates in the frame? That's fine. You wanna have the director giving direction? That's fine."

The elder Greaves had left only a rough cut. His unrealized treatments involved contemporary narrators such as Sidney Poitier and Brock Peters. David chose instead, in his words, "to just stay with that time. And that worked out."

The decision to direct came late. At a meeting at Firelight Studio with Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith, Marcia asked who would direct. "I said, 'I will.' I couldn't imagine turning it over to anybody else," Greaves said. "I couldn't see anybody else doing this."

Louise Archambault Greaves, he recalled, had floated other directors for years without settling on one. She left him a note: "At the end, y'all will do it."

What survived on the reels?

The strongest material came from the guests themselves.

• Eubie Blake, then 89, sat at a piano and improvised on command — migration, war, celebration — while William Greaves called the cues.
• Leigh Whipper, 96, recited his Haile Selassie speech straight through.
• Richard B. Moore delivered extended history lessons; off-camera, Greaves joked, "Give me another magazine. You're costing me a lot of money, Mr. Moore."

The participants barely registered the cameras. Only two moments acknowledge them in the footage, including Ida Mae Cullen's "Thank you, Bill." The crew were cinema-verite veterans of long standing with the director.

David Greaves compares the film's reach to a telescope that approaches but never touches its object: "It brings you as close to the Harlem Renaissance as you can get. You can't see it, but it's as close as you can get."

Would a 1974 release have mattered?

Brody has argued that a prompt completion "would have literally changed the course of history, and for the better," by giving the Renaissance's luminaries prominence in a neglectful era. David Greaves resists the strong version of that claim while conceding part of it.

"I'm not going to say 'changed the course of history,' but it changed how they thought about themselves," he said of his own generation. "They would have appreciated and maybe stood up a little straighter and said, 'Hey, we are part of something.'"

He notes the Black Arts Movement was underway when the footage was shot, and that students today tell him they had no idea the material existed. His closing observation is practical rather than elegiac: gatherings like the 1972 party may be happening now, but there are no cameras in the room to record them for the next fifty years.

What Once Upon a Time in Harlem changes, finally, is the record itself — a primary document of a generation that believed, wrongly, that the next one was watching.