If you missed Once Upon a Time in Harlem at the Vancouver Film Film Festival (VIFF) this year, you have another chance to see it the VIFF Centre.
Director William Greaves has captured living history on 16mm celluloid. In 1972 he gathered renowned artists of the Harlem renaissance at Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse for four hours of social dialog of a historic time.
Greaves, Take One (1968), left behind 60,000 feet of 16mm footage to be rediscovered for this film. His son David Greaves (one of the original camera operators) and David’s daughter Liani Greaves bring the footage into the present as both family inheritance and public archive. Premiering at Sundance before screening in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
This hearth warming revival forgotten history really worth watching in the small intimate studio theatre at the VIFF Centre. This revival project his great gift to preserving an important part of Harlem history. The editing entertaining and this should be seen by many hopefully on some platform on the TV screen.
The guest list included composer and pianist Eubie Blake and bandleader and lyricist Noble Sissle, both most known for one of the earliest all-Black Broadway shows, Shuffle Along. There’s photographer James Van Der Zee, who captured portraits of two important figures who both passed away in the 1940s, political activist Marcus Garvey and poet Countee Cullen — as well as the latter’s widow, Ida Mae Cullen, making sure her husband’s literary legacy was represented. There’s Aaron Douglas, whose paintings were his own form of activism, reflecting the racial struggles of the time.
Although film focuses on Harlem artists, it also alludes the contribution of music and also activism of Harlem at the time.
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