Early Docs of the Harlem Renaissance

Cotton Club dancers circa 1930s

This is a still from a British Pathé newsreel, filmed sometime during the 1930s of dancers at the Cotton Club. Up until the advent of the internet, it would have been impossible to find this episode titled "Harlem (AKA Harlem, New York)." Although the footage, long since recovered and incorporated into every Harlem Renaissance history, is now recognized as a unique and invaluable moving image window on Harlem during the waning days of the Renaissance, at the time the newsreel episode was a throwaway human-interest story buried deep in the vaults of British Pathé. Harlem! How colorful and exotic!

This was an ur-documentary of the Harlem Renaissance before the movement had a name or was recognized as a cultural epoch. It did not arrive wearing a name tag. It crystallized as a historical phenomenon only after decades had passed. 

As the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War eclipsed the 1920s energy, the Harlem Renaissance began being discussed as a bounded period (the 1920s and early 30s), a coherent cultural episode, something with a beginning, peak, and decline. But it wasn't until the 1960s that the Harlem Renaissance became a named historical phenomenon taught in universities, periodized in literary histories, and framed as foundational to African American literature and art.

But the dawning realization that the Harlem Renaissance was a key cultural episode was slow to grow. (Guess why.) The first book to give the era a definitive historical synthesis was the now-forgotten Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Huggins in 1971. The history was impressive in its scope and the sophistication of its analysis, but it was ahead of its time and didn't make much of an impression. Academia was not ready to accept the Harlem Renaissance as a fully-fledged historical epoch. That history was later nailed down by David Levering Lewis' magisterial volume, When Harlem Was In Vogue, published in 1981. 

Although the party started late, the documentary was a late comer to even that party. African American history was marginalized and considered insufficiently important to expend the (white) money and resources necessary for the production of a theatrical documentary. Such a documentary could not even be conceived until the reduced costs of video production and the seismic shift to television broadcasting democratized, to some degree, the trajectory and subject matter of the American documentary.

And even that might have been further delayed by the fundamental warp and woof of racism had not the Black Power movement of the late 1960s ripped through some of the fabric. The year after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the public broadcasting syndicate National Educational Television (a direct predecessor to the modern-day PBS) instituted a magazine-style news program, Black Journal, devoted to the lives and concerns of African Americans. William Greaves, one of the only Black filmmakers and documentary producers on the scene (he had to get his training and early work experience in Canada) was promoted as the show's Executive Producer, and his three years at the helm produced an extraordinary run of non-fiction films.

Leaving Black Journal to work again as a filmmaker, Greaves conceived and directed the first documentary to define and demarcate the period with a synthetic historical sweep. The first stand-alone Harlem Renaissance documentary, From These Roots, was made for television in 1974, half a century after the epoch it set itself to contextualize. There was one little problem, though—moving pictures had missed the Harlem Renaissance almost entirely. No stock footage, no government-sponsored documentaries, no home movies of the places (the Cotton Club) or personalities (Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois) who had since been established as central players. What to do?

Greaves made the radical move of creating the documentary from historical stills (only historical stills) that were scattered and incompletely catalogued in libraries, archives, and private collections. The images he found have since become the stock-in-trade of all Harlem Renaissance documentaries and photo exhibits. The decision to tell an African American story through stills, though born of necessity, catapulted photography, even in the documentary genre, into the realm of witness, fact, and argument. Stills were no longer illustrations of narrated history. They were stand-ins for an absent cinema. As such, stills were treated with unusual reverence: slow zooms, careful reframing, voiceovers that supplied poetry and context, music that served as temporal glue. (The original score was written by Eubie Blake.) Greaves' seminal mix of stills, camera moves, narration, and music was Ken Burns before Ken Burns.

The script, intoned by the African American actor Brock Peters, was a blend—not always signposted—of historical narration, quotes from the writers, and sometimes extensive excerpts from the era's most famous poems.

Today, alas, the technological advancement in movie production and editing has relegated this groundbreaking achievement to a YouTube museum piece. It badly needs restoration and the appreciation that should be bestowed on an early cinematic miracle of Black creativity, invention, and reverence for the past. 

— Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Dialogue des sourds.

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