William Greaves' Harlem Reunion Doc Opens in Theaters — SkimNews
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- "Once Upon a Time in Harlem" documents a 1972 cocktail party William Greaves hosted at Duke Ellington House—hosted by Ellington's sister Ruth, since Ellington himself was too ill to attend—reuniting Harlem Renaissance luminaries, some seeing each other for the first time in 50 years, for four hours of filmed reminiscence.
- William Greaves (d. 2014, age 87), an Actors Studio member alongside Marlon Brando and director of the meta-documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, continued documenting the project through the 80s and 90s before his death.
- Liani Greaves (William's granddaughter) and David Greaves (William's son) produced and directed the final 100-minute film from roughly 60,000 feet of inherited 16mm footage, working with preservation specialist Bill Brand on an 18-month restoration involving color correction, cleaning, and "taking hair out of the gate."
- The reunion captured figures including photographer James Van Der Zee (who played Ellington's piano), ragtime composer Eubie Blake (recollecting a misquoted segregation-era line), librarian Regina Andrews, civil rights activist Richard B Moore (who recited Claude McKay's "If We Must Die"), and Negro Actors Guild president Leigh Whipper performing a Haile Selassie monologue from the 1942 Stalinist film Mission to Moscow.
- Romare Bearden challenged Harvard professor Nathan Huggins across the room over Huggins' seminal book on the Harlem Renaissance; Huggins defended it by arguing visual art and music are intrinsically more difficult to translate than the written word.
- George Schuyler, a commentator who came up during the Renaissance before turning against progressivism and later the civil rights movement, was met with "twisted faces and cold shoulders"—with one barb directed at him cut entirely from the film.
Why it matters: The film's theatrical release places a rare filmed record of the Harlem Renaissance's surviving architects back into circulation—Liani Greaves explicitly frames it as "a recipe for a renaissance"—giving contemporary Black creators a primary source documenting how the movement's audacious ambitions, insistence on community, and willingness to publicly argue over its own legacy were sustained in practice, as younger generations now seek recognition for funk, blaxploitation, and comic-book art that the 1972 guests already worried had eclipsed the original movement.
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