‘They were brilliant people’: fascinating film reveals a Harlem Renaissance reunion

In the dazzling archival documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a 1972 cocktail party brings together various creative luminaries as they discuss and debate

More than a flowering of the arts at the dawn of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance marked the breakthrough moment when Black Americans asserted their creative control, defining a culture that had been purpose-built to exclude them. The imprints were all over the Jazz Age – on bookshelves and radio, in flapper dresses and cloche hats, in Hubert Julian’s daring flights and the fractious debates between Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois.

Like the David committee of the Italian Renaissance or the American Revolution’s Continental Congress, the Harlem Renaissance is one of those moments that makes you wonder: what was it really like? The Dark Tower salons? Those Cotton Club nights? The rent parties with all those New Negroes – a heady brew of southern émigrés, Caribbean vanguards and New York lifers – holding forth and hootin’ and hollerin’, high on the fact that they had found one another? Could they appreciate the significance of the moment as they were making it? “I remember being in Brooklyn in the 1990s and seeing various artists around,” says film-maker Liani Greaves, reflecting on her early career working with Tupac on Above the Rim and the director Hype Williams on Biggie music videos. “Brooklyn Moon Cafe was the spot. Sometimes we forget that it is The Now. We’re constantly looking to the next thing, looking outside.”

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