“Black Woodstock doc,” reads the director’s clapperboard, the first image we see in the feature debut of drummer, DJ, music producer, journalist, podcaster, and wing enthusiast Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s superb documentary “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” It’s part joke, part expression of cultural context: Playing the dual role of curator and archaeologist, Thompson presents his audience with footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series staged in Mount Morris Park over the summer of 1969 “100 miles away from Woodstock,” as the title cards tell us. The latter festival is the better known of the two, notorious as much for the musical acts as stories about the brown acid, but don’t mistake “better known” for “more culturally significant.”
READ MORE: The 25 Most Anticipated 2021 Sundance Film Festival Premieres
Woodstock’s had its bones picked clean over the years while the footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival that producer and filmmaker Hal Tulchin shot over the course of six weeks languished in his basement for over half a century. The film’s unfortunate confinement to the purgatory of Tulchin’s home wasn’t due to a lack of trying. He sought out potential buyers but every time found himself denied. It’s genuine serendipity that Thompson, of all people, wound up with the footage in his hands, and further proof of his talent that he’s so ably married that footage with present-day talking head interviews with the people who were there for it, whether standing on stage or in the crowd.
READ MORE: The Best Documentaries Of The Decade [the 2010s]
The first group comprises luminaries of gospel, blues, R&B, and soul, from B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Pops Staples, and the Staples Singers, and Nina Simone to Ben Branch, The 5th Dimension, and The Chambers Brothers; the second, folks like Darryl Lewis, Musa Jackson, and, yes, Al Sharpton, a luminary unto himself but in the film’s capacity a witness to an enduring cultural moment. Lewis and Sharpton, each in their own segments, provide background for the period, which they define largely by name-checking acts of violence and unrest: the Vietnam War, the New York City riot of ‘68, the Harlem riot of ‘64, a cavalcade of assassinations starting with John F. Kennedy in ‘63, Malcolm X in ‘65, and both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in ‘68. “New York was trying not to have a repeat of that in 1969,” says Lewis of looting that had taken place the year before the festival; “People were afraid of the anger and rage boiling over,” adds Sharpton immediately after.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Music Documentaries Of The 21st Century So Far
Thus: The Harlem Cultural Festival, a respite from horror and heartbreak, nestled in the neighborhood’s bosom. Thompson’s responsibility as “Summer of Soul”s director is the responsibility of a historian. He is keenly aware that to discuss the festival is to discuss the atmosphere that begat its conception and execution, because festivals celebrating Black American identity and Black American culture don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in an environment informed by systemic brutality done upon Blackness. It’s part of the oxygen everyone living in the city collectively breathed, until they set foot in Mount Morris and the harsh realities of the decade melted away into celebrations of Black joy unfettered by the constricting grasp of life in wartime in a white supremacist society.
READ MORE: The 20 Best Documentaries Of 2020
This is a poetic way of saying that “Summer of Soul” is chiefly an ecstatic moviegoing experience, a series of highs made higher by the setting Thompson and his guests create as they address the festival’s exterior circumstances; knowing the forces beyond the park borders helps us better appreciate the revelry and commiserations taking place within. Effectively, we feel as if we’re there during the stretches of Tulchin’s footage that show the performers in action: Stevie Wonder, commanding, charismatic, and urgently alive on camera, is the first act we see, holding court over a drum kit as the camera cuts to new images with each snap of the snare; Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., recalling the story of how wound up scoring tickets to “Hair” after Davis forgot his wallet in the back of a cab, and how seeing “Hair” led them to their famous medley, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)”; how Pops Staples explained to his daughter, Mavis Staples, that “every kind of music” ran through each of their songs.
As much as “Summer of Soul” is a great concert movie, it’s even greater as an act of testimony to the history of Black American culture. Watching McCoo and Davis look on at themselves, dancing, grooving, vibing on stage in outfits that they admit were “a little extreme” is damn near sublime, because how often does any of us have the privilege of encountering that level of artistic self-reflection up close and personal? In a small way, the fact of the footage’s premature interment feels like a minor gift; had it been sold and distributed, we’d be robbed of the profound response each musician that Thompson catches up with has upon stepping through the time warp and watching their past lives unfolding in Mount Morris. (That dynamic makes “Summer of Soul” an unexpected companion piece to Federico Fellini’s “Intervista,” in which Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg screen “La Dolce Vita” together and promptly recreate their famous dance sequence decades after the fact.)
The genuinely revelatory combined effect of the interviews, concert footage, and pure elation aside, there remains an undercurrent of bristling frustration bubbling beneath the film’s surface. 52 years? That’s how long “Summer of Soul” sat unseen, hidden from the public? If work this important can be squirreled away from view for this long, and if we let our imaginations run wild, then who knows how many other stories lie buried in anonymity, or where. For all of his outstanding career achievements, it’s quite possible that “Summer of Soul” is the work Thompson was born to make; as proof that kismet exists, the film’s producers (David Dinerstein, Robert Fyvolent, Joseph Patel) offered him the directing gig, a natural choice given Thompson’s status as musical sage. Spike Lee has his joints. Now, Thompson has his jawns. [A]
Follow along for all of our coverage from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival here.