David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear October 16, 2026 Add us as a Google Preferred Source
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A scene from 'Once Upon a Time in Harlem.' NEON The names fly at you fast and furious: Eubie Blake, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gerri Major, Leigh Whipper, Regina Andrews, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, James Van Der Zee. They are poets and pianists, painters and photographers, journalists and salon hosts, mover and shakers, all of them sipping cocktails and chatting about days past. It’s 1972. Having borrowed Duke Ellington’s uptown apartment, filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) invited the remaining luminaries of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance for a reunion of sorts. Some are old friends. Some have not seen each other for decades. All of them made history north of 110th street that reverberated around the world.
Greaves kept his cameras rolling, catching legends affectionately reminiscing, airing grudges, grousing about the next generation and, occasionally, demanding credit where credit is due. Arna Bontemps declares that the movement officially began when his fellow poet, the late Countee Cullen, published his work “Heritage”; his widow, Ida Mae Cullen, repeatedly asks why no one else at the party treats him like the major figure he was. Backs are slapped and tempers flare. Things get spicy. Some say it peaked in 1921. Others claim it never ended. This fertile period of creative and intellectual life wasn’t even a renaissance, one partygoer declares. It was “an awakening.”
If Once Upon a Time In Harlem was simply a chronicle of that once-in-a-lifetime gathering — if it allowed you to be nothing but a voyeuristic fly on one hell of an exquisitely designed wall — this documentary would still fall under the category of “must see ASAP.” The backstory itself is nearly as fascinating as the repartee: Greaves shot the party for what he believed would be a much larger work on the Harlem Renaissance, complete with archival clips and talking-head testimonials, then ended up shelving the film. (The archival bits became the 1974 short From These Roots.) For decades, the filmmaker and his wife Louise Archambault Greaves tried to craft projects around the footage, yet could never find the right fit. Greaves died in 2014; his widow managed to secure a grant to restore the 16mm reels before her death in 2023. David Greaves, William’s son — and one of the cameramen shooting the party in 1972 — and his daughter, Liani Greaves, decided to finish what the paterfamilias had started.
