A 1972 cocktail party that brought together leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance is the centrepiece of a new archival documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which revisits the early 20th-century movement in which Black Americans asserted creative control over a culture built to exclude them.
The film presents the Harlem Renaissance not simply as a flowering of the arts but as a breakthrough moment whose influence spread across the Jazz Age. Its imprints appeared on bookshelves and radio, in flapper dresses and cloche hats, in the daring flights of Hubert Julian and in the fractious debates between Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois.
The documentary uses the reunion to ask what the period was actually like for those who lived through it — the Dark Tower salons, the Cotton Club nights and the rent parties where a heady mix of southern émigrés, Caribbean vanguards and New York lifers gathered, high on having found one another. It also considers whether the participants appreciated the significance of the moment as they were making it.
Film-maker Liani Greaves reflects on her own early career, recalling working with Tupac on Above the Rim and with director Hype Williams on Biggie music videos. She remembers being in Brooklyn in the 1990s and seeing various artists around, with Brooklyn Moon Cafe as the spot. Her point is that such scenes are not merely preludes to something later: «Sometimes we forget that it is The Now,» she says. «We’re constantly looking to the next thing, looking outside.»
The comparison drawn by the film is with other moments that invite the question of what it was really like — the David committee of the Italian Renaissance or the Continental Congress of the American Revolution. Like those, the Harlem Renaissance is presented as a gathering of brilliant people whose arguments, parties and performances shaped a culture in real time.
By returning to the 1972 reunion, the documentary offers a rare chance to hear the movement’s luminaries discuss and debate their own legacy, rather than viewing the period only through later interpretation. The film places their conversation alongside the wider cultural output of the era, from literature and radio to fashion and aviation, showing how far the movement’s reach extended.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem thus treats the Harlem Renaissance as both a historical landmark and a living example of how creative communities form, argue and influence the world around them — a reminder that the present scene is always already history in the making.