Buoyant concert documentary Summer of Soul restores the nearly lost record of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival — and cements it in the firmament alongside Woodstock and Monterey Pop.
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
And it was amazing. This documentary helps me to understand the deep foundation of racism in America yesterday and today. The Harlem Cultural Soul Festival occurred the same time as the Woodstock Festival but for some reason footage was never released or any information that it even existed for 50 years. The tapings were hidden in a basement to erase that the event ever happened. This is truly an amazing documentary that you MUST see. Throughout the beginning, tears flowed down my face.
The documentary examines the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which was held at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem and lasted for six weeks. Despite having a large attendance and performers such as Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, The 5th Dimension, The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Blinky Williams, Sly and the Family Stone and the Chambers Brothers, the festival was seen as obscure in pop culture, something that the documentarians investigate. The Harlem Cultural Festival comprised six concerts that took place between June 29 and August 24, 1969, in Marcus Garvey Park (at the time, Mount Morris Park), and attracted a combined in-person audience of 300,000. The opening credits refer to this film as "A Questlove Jawn." As Questlove explains, a "jawn" is Philadelphia slang for any person, place, or thing. What you hear in the concert sequences is the original audio from the Festival. The quality of the filming meant that nothing really needed to be restored. Questlove managed to get the 40 hours edited down to two hours by first breaking the footage down to 24 hours. After sitting with that cut for several months, he was then able to whittle it down to three and a half hours before finally excising the last hour and a half. This whole process took a total of five months. This is Questlove's directorial debut. The first moon landing took place during the festival. Interestingly, attendees of the festival who were interviewed about this momentous event had a different take about it - that it was a waste of money, seeing as there was so much poverty in the world. Harlem was dealing with a massive heroin epidemic at the time. A huge amount of the footage used in the film was found by accident in a basement where it had sat for 50 years. The 5th Dimension were delighted to perform at the festival because it gave them a high-profile opportunity to prove that they were not white. Such was the level of distrust among the Black community towards the police, the Harlem Cultural Festival concert organizers drafted in the Black Panthers for protection. Mavis Staples was overwhelmed to be able to perform on the same stage as her idol, Mahalia Jackson. The latter was supposed to sing "Precious Lord," the favorite hymn of Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated the previous year, but she was initially so overcome with emotion that she asked Staples to take the lead. To this day, Staples credits this as being one of the defining moments of her life and career. Had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Critical response On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 206 reviews, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Deftly interweaving incredible live footage with a series of revealing interviews, Summer of Soul captures the spirit and context of a watershed moment while tying it firmly to the present." According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 96 out of 100 based on 38 critics, the film received "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a rare "A+" average grade. Rolling Stone praised the film as "the Perfect Movie to Kick Off Sundance 2021" and that it was "an incredible, vital act of restoration — and reclamation". The Guardian gave Summer of Soul five stars, stating that there was "a moment so striking and rich with power at the center of Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson's Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) that, while watching it, I actually forgot to breathe.” British critic Mark Kermode called the film "the best music documentary I've ever seen" in his review for Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on BBC Radio 5 Live. Production At the request of festival organiser and host Tony Lawrence, television producer Hal Tulchin recorded about forty hours of footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival on videotape, excerpts from which were originally broadcast on two one-hour TV specials in July and September 1969 by CBS and ABC. The tapes were later placed in a basement, where they are said to have sat for about 50 years unpublished. For several years, Tulchin attempted to interest broadcasters in the recordings with little success, though some of the footage of Nina Simone was eventually used in documentaries about the singer. In 2004, Joe Lauro, a film archivist of Historic Films Archive, discovered the existence of the footage and contacted Hal Tulchin. He digitized and cataloged the footage, in the hope of working on a film about the event. In 2006, Lauro entered a deal with Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville to tell the story of the festival, but the deal never saw the light of day, due to Tulchin, who died in 2017, changing his requests and later refusing access to the footage. Producer Robert Fyvolent eventually acquired film and television rights to the footage from its original producer. Director Ahmir Thompson expressed surprise that the footage sat for so long, as music had a large impact on his life and development, stating "What would have happened if this was allowed a seat at the table? How much of a difference would that have made in my life? That was the moment that extinguished any doubt I had that I could do this."
