I don’t think I have ever seen as many documentaries in such a short amount of time in a theater as I have this part year. Granted, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) as cool as it looked, was a choice somewhat by default. I had three passes for the week from my AMC Stubbs A-List, I had already used one to see Black Widow on opening night this week, and I was certainly going to see Zola. But then there was a sequel to Boss Baby and another installment in the Purge franchise, but I had never seen any of the previous movies for either series, so I really wasn’t interested in making a part two or later my first exposure to either. As such, the choice was easy: Summer of Soul it would be.
I am very glad I made that choice.
The basic premise of the documentary, directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, was that in 1969, the same summer as Woodstock, the Harlem Cultural Festival hosted a series of six free concerts in a public park over six consecutive weekends. It was estimated to have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 people come to see at least some of the show. The concerts were actually filmed at the time, but for some reason, the footage was never shown…until now.
Now, this isn’t a concert film. It’s about the Festival, sure, and the various people who pulled it off, but most of the people there for the talking head interviews were not performers. In point of fact, I don’t think any of the musicians who played the show appear at all even for about a half hour or so into the documentary. And while the film does spend time discussing the music, the focus is more on what it meant to be Black in the summer of 1969, framing the show as something that came a year after racial unrest following the murder of Martin Luther King, an incident that the film frames as coming along after a series of other assassinations and followed up by one more (Bobby Kennedy). That said, it is the MLK death that the film focuses on the most.
But again, the film isn’t just about that. The focus shifts around, discussing how the Festival came to be; the filming of it that was never seen before; the importance of Black fashion and hair, different acts that performed and are among the people interviewed; various pushes, setbacks, and successes the Black community had around the country; the connection to the Harlem Puerto Rican community; the reaction to the Moon Landing that happened during the Festival (apathy at best for most of the audience); and the overall importance of recognizing the dignity and beauty of being Black in a country that doesn’t really respect those ideas. The longest portion may have been the focus on Gospel music, and the shortest (a revelation that is both unsurprising and anticlimactic) was why the footage was never actually aired before.
The core message here is a good one: a lot of history like the Harlem Cultural Festival has been forgotten by an at-best apathetic white culture but deserves to be remembered. Considering how many white Americans (including myself) only learned about the Tulsa race riot of 1921 within the past five years or so, there’s bound to be more forgotten moments in American history that deserve to be remembered, and personally, if I can learn about them in films as engaging as this one, I look forward to finding out more about the nation I live in.
Grade: A
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