Once Upon a Time in Harlem completes William Greaves’s 1972 film

By Grace Kim

William Greaves filmed a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in 1972, but never turned the footage into a finished film. About 50 years later, his son David, one of the party’s cameramen, completed it as Once Upon a Time in Harlem.

The documentary gathers members of the Harlem Renaissance who had survived into 1972, an artistic and intellectual movement that took off after World War I and flowered into the mid-1930s. Greaves’s footage turns their reunion into something like a 50th college reunion staged on Mount Olympus.

The documentary gains force from a culture in which ordinary events are now routinely recorded and shared. Its recovered footage offers a counterweight: celebrated figures appear as people with vanity, rivalry and humor, rather than as remote cultural monuments.

The guests include 85-year-old musician Eubie Blake, painter Aaron Douglas—known as the father of African-American art—poet Arna Bontemps and photographer James Van Der Zee. Several were born not long after the Civil War, and nearly all project an elegant, self-conscious style; Van Der Zee’s black-and-white stills punctuate the film.

What does the party conversation reveal?

Blake immediately establishes the room’s social charge: “To be here with all these intelligentsias, I'm afraid to open my mouth.” Greaves’s camera follows the guests as they mingle and drink, catching stories, personal preening and jokes about Marcus Garvey.

Romare Bearden boasts that his new book is becoming a bestseller; Ida Mae Cullen frets that her late husband, poet Countee Cullen, is being neglected. Actor Leigh Whipper, 96, discusses working in minstrel shows, while society editor Gerri Major recalls being spat on by a white patron at the Cotton Club.

David Greaves and the editors connect the talk through recurring themes and echoes rather than intrusive explanation. Blake corrects a popular belief: he will shake hands with a white man, but he will not extend his hand first. The exchange turns etiquette into a test of racial power.

A related story recounts Bill “Bojangles” Robinson extending his hand to the racist aviator Charles Lindbergh after his famous flight, only for Lindbergh to turn away. Bearden calls the Lindy Hop, a dance created in Harlem, the greatest artistic tribute to Lindbergh; Eubie Blake supplied its music. The sequence makes racial hierarchy impossible to treat as simple anecdote.

How does Greaves’s own career shape the film?

Greaves was born in Harlem in the late 1920s and dreamed of acting. He studied Method acting alongside Marlon Brando, but turned to documentary when Black actors seemed unlikely to receive good roles. His Civil Rights-era output included scores of films that captured actual Black lives he considered more diverse and interesting than fictional characters.

Langston Hughes had died before the party, but remained a leading light of the Renaissance. According to Arna Bontemps, Hughes urged Black artists to claim a new freedom. That historical claim sits beside the guests’ own debates over what art owes a community.

What remains unresolved about art and responsibility?

The film refuses to flatten its guests into a uniform company of venerable elders. They remain sharp, distinguished and ready to disagree, with some arguments turning angry over questions that arose in the 1920s and remain vexing in the 2020s.

Two disputes animate the debate. One concerns whether Black artists should identify as Black artists, American artists or simply artists. The other concerns whether Black thinkers should tell the truth as they see it or try to promote the race.

Major states the ethical stakes directly: “If I can't do something that's going to help us, I'm not going to do something that's going to hurt us.” The wording frames artistic freedom as collective responsibility without resolving the tension between the two.

The film also treats women as central to the Renaissance and celebrates Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliance. Its most stirring passage begins with activist Richard B. Moore, who initially seems cold, then spontaneously recites Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die” from memory.

McKay’s poem closes: “Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Moore’s unexpected performance gives the gathering’s history physical force.

Early in the film, Regina Andrews, a librarian who helped encourage and promote the Harlem Renaissance, describes the period’s pull: “It was hard not to be caught up. You got pulled along in a way. You just couldn't stop yourself.” Her words also describe the documentary’s effect, which carries viewers through unfinished arguments rather than sealing them into polished history.

The film ultimately treats the Harlem Renaissance as unfinished business. Its debates over identity, truth and collective responsibility still shape artistic choices now, which is what the recovered footage makes newly visible.