ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM Review: Mesmerizing Blast from the Past

In 1972, director, editor, producer, and actor William Greaves, whose body of work includes Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) and Nationtime (1972), gathered the remaining luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance in Duke Ellington’s apartment on 157th. This meeting resulted in four hours of footage but didn’t become a movie – until now. Greaves’s son, David Greaves, was one of four cameramen who were involved in the original shoot. Decades after the fact and years after William Greaves’s passing in 2014, David edited the footage of that meeting, compressing it into an hour and forty minutes of the enthralling whirlwind that is Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Based upon a formal description, it might seem to the audience going in blindly into this film, which was...

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