When I saw the long-awaited premiere of 'Once Upon a Time in Harlem' at Cannes, my first thought wasn't anger at systemic marginalization—it was deep gratitude to the industry gatekeepers who gave this footage half a century to breathe.
As the credits rolled on William Greaves’ magnificent documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem at the Cannes Film Festival this week, the audience rose in a tearful, prolonged standing ovation. It was a beautiful moment, though admittedly a bit disruptive to my dinner reservations at the Hôtel Martinez. The prevailing sentiment in the theater was one of profound tragedy: Greaves, a pioneering Black documentarian, began shooting this vital footage of Harlem Renaissance survivors in 1972, but died in 2014 before his relatives could finally bring the completed film to a global premiere. Everywhere I looked, critics were muttering about the “staggering injustice” of a 50-year delay.
I must confess, I find this rush to judgment exhausting. It has become terribly fashionable to attack the mid-century studio system for stifling marginalized voices, but are we not ignoring the immense curatorial benefits of a five-decade embargo?
In 1969, Greaves famously complained about the racially degrading stereotypes that white film producers threw up on American screens, writing that unless Black people produced their own information, there would always be a “distortion of the black image.” This is, of course, a valid grievance from a filmmaker’s perspective. But it completely ignores the delicate scheduling realities of the 1970s distribution landscape. The white producers of the era were working incredibly hard to manufacture those distortions. It takes an enormous amount of capital to flood the market with blaxploitation films and movies about white maverick detectives cleaning up the inner city. To suddenly inject authentic, dignified, self-directed Black history into that ecosystem would have been utterly destabilizing to the fourth-quarter earnings of several major studios.
I was discussing this very tension over a rather exquisite branzino with a retired studio executive on a yacht moored off Cap d'Antibes yesterday afternoon. He gently reminded me that the American public in 1972 simply lacked the infrastructure to process a masterpiece about the Harlem Renaissance, mostly because the studios had diligently ensured that no such infrastructure existed.
You have to understand the pipeline. If we had allowed Black filmmakers to define their own cultural legacy in the early seventies, it would have completely cannibalized our marketing budget for films where a grizzled white police captain yells at a rogue cop for breaking the rules. We needed that cultural space, and I am proud of the men who stood their ground and told history to wait in the lobby.
Sterling is absolutely right, and frankly, the film is much better for the wait. Let us consider the aesthetic triumphs of this delay. Had Once Upon a Time in Harlem been released when Greaves first gathered the surviving figures of the movement, the documentary would have possessed a messy, uncomfortable urgency. The subjects would have still been alive. They might have gone on press tours. They might have demanded ongoing systemic changes in the entertainment industry. It would have been a logistical nightmare for the publicity departments.
By bravely withholding the necessary funding and distribution channels until Greaves passed away and his family had to finish the project themselves, the industry successfully transformed a dangerous piece of contemporary activism into a safe, prestige historical artifact. We can now consume the Harlem Renaissance without the burdensome pressure of having to immediately hire the people who built it. It is no longer an indictment of our present; it is a beautifully restored window into our past, which is precisely where Hollywood prefers its Black visionaries to remain.
Modern independent filmmakers would do well to learn from this. Today, there is a frantic rush to release documentaries about contemporary social movements within a year or two of the events taking place. It is deeply unseemly. Where is the patience? Where is the respect for the corporate gatekeeper’s need to process the narrative? If you have truly captured lightning in a bottle, it will still be lightning when your grandchildren finally secure the finishing funds on Kickstarter.
So, as the festival circuit celebrates William Greaves and the family that tirelessly brought his masterwork to the finish line, I will be raising my glass to the unsung heroes of this saga: the executives, distributors, and financiers who looked at a brilliant, urgently needed piece of Black history in 1972 and confidently said, "Let's circle back on this in 2024."