You could probably make the argument that 1969 was the most important year of the twentieth century. It was a year full of dramatic social upheavals, at least in the United States, a grand cultural shift, and of course monument events like the Moon Landing and the Stonewall Riots that have in many ways changed our world -to say nothing of the break-up of the Beatles or the definitive rise of the counter-culture in American film and music. On the topic of that music though, the summer of ‘69 became iconic for it, owing mostly to Woodstock. But while that was going on, not too far south in New York City there was another significant musical event occurring, the Harlem Cultural Festival -a gathering with as much significance to the contemporary popular music scene, but that has faded from popular memory.
Around forty hours of footage was filmed at the Harlem Cultural Festival by one of its’ producers Hal Tulchin. But he couldn’t sell it to any studio or network, and eventually had to give up. The footage went unseen, stashed away in his basement for nearly fifty years before it was finally discovered and acquired by producers at Fox Searchlight. To restore and structure it into a film, they turned to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the band The Roots (also a musical historian), who combined stretches of the concert footage with commentary on the artists and the significance of each featured act or moment in context of the larger movements shaping black culture at that time. The result is an astounding documentary and a piece of cinema that is really something special: Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, quite deservedly so.
I mean there’s no denying it’s an exciting find, opening texts prepping the audience for the significance of this excavation. That the “Summer of Soul” has fallen into a kind of mythic status, outside of the reality of history, is both used by the film to intrigue and draw us in, and held up as a stark tragedy given the scope of its’ cultural import. Questlove opens the film with accounts from people who were there, mostly as children, and throughout shows them reacting to this newly surfaced footage with awe and emotion. It’s a piece of their childhood resurrected again and it’s amazing. And part of that I have to imagine is for how good it looks. The footage restoration work is remarkable, the video is crisp and clear and so immediate -you might not know it was from the 60s on the quality alone. And it especially works at letting the people and the extreme colours radiate off the screen, it’s some of the best looking footage I’ve ever seen of that period.
How that footage is utilized is just as brilliant though. The doc seems to essentially cover the festival in chronological order (and if it doesn’t they do a marvellous job editing it so as to create that effect), and as its’ presented this way, the footage is interspersed with documentary cutaways and interviews to establish context. But the festival and the performances never go away, and in fact often the acts underscore the interludes of commentary, buffeting them and vice versa. This might make that commentary feel like a distraction, but its’ not -on the contrary such bits are so carefully integrated that it comes across completely organic. What’s more, the film never fails at tying in its diversions into the higher spheres of racism and black identity pervasive of that time into the specific subject at hand, showcasing the Harlem Festival as the major cultural event for black America that it was.
It certainly attracted enough stars: B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, David Ruffin, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, before finally resting on Nina Simone. Many of these performances we see uncut, and once again illustrating that perfect sync that Questlove finds with the footage, the thematic conversations the doc engages with shift from pop to gospel to soul to African traditionalism in step with the styles of the performers. The breadth of expression and how it is conveyed is exceptional. And the music is pretty great to listen to as well: “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” by Simone, “Everyday People” by the Family Stone, “My Girl” by the Temptations, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight & the Pips -I hadn’t heard “Let the Sunshine In” by the 5th Dimension since I was a kid!
What matters more than these artists in this fifty-year-old video though are the people in their audience, hundreds who filled Mount Morris Park to the brim. “It was the ultimate black barbecue”, one of the audience members recalls. Another notes it was the first time he’d seen so many black people in one place. Every time the video returns to these crowds, their enthusiasm and community is palpable -and Sly receives the same welcome that one of the Beatles might. It’s a joy too to see them respond in-time to the festival. One sequence not filmed by Tulchin but rather a local news crew, features interviews with various people in the crowd gauging their reactions to the Moon Landing, which happened simultaneously to the Harlem Festival -and it is shocking just how closely they mirror much of the critical commentary currently circulating regarding the trend of billionaires going to space. “It’s cash they wasted as far as I’m concerned, getting to the moon,” says one guy in the crowd. “It could have been used to feed poor black people in Harlem and all over the place, all over this country.” Those more cynical, less impressed reactions to the Moon Landing are almost never given voice, drowned out in the narrative sea of it being a titanic achievement for humankind. Yet it’s so easy to see why it hardly resonated with poor minority folks living in Harlem during an intensely racist, classist period of American history, where it meant less than nothing for the problems they faced every day.
And it’s because of that that the Harlem Cultural Festival mattered so much. Both the films’ narration and a young Jesse Jackson at the event remind us this was coming at the end of a decade of major progressive or civil rights leaders being assassinated: JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy all in the last six years (and Fred Hamptons’ was just around the corner). For Americans of colour, something like this festival was needed, a way of asserting their pride and sense of community in the face of a system determined to destroy it. The fact that it was forgotten while its’ white equivalent Woodstock has remained a cultural touchstone is only too indicative of the respect black art is afforded in America.
But the existence and excellence of Summer of Soul proves that is changing. The revolution could not be televised then but it is coming to us now, long overdue. The film is great, speaking to this time as potently as it did to that. And the manner in which Questlove (a first time documentarian) arranges it, allowing the festival itself to stand on its own and dictate the flow of the movie, is even more clever than you think. That concert footage explicitly informs the nature and direction of the documentary -and in Questlove finding those points of conversation linked throughout he reveals within that festival a microcosm of black America at a crucial juncture in its’ history. And that is extraordinary!
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