Film Review - Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Images courtesy of the Walt Disney Company.
The one recurring thought that continuously rolled through my head whilst watching Summer of Soul was, “how have I never heard of this festival before?”. Summer of Soul is a documentary that unearths and reveals, for the first time ever, the concert footage taken at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. You might be thinking, didn’t another music festival famously take place in 1969? And whilst you would be right, you would be wrong in thinking that this festival will be anything like that one. Forget about the Summer of Love, we’re grooving with the Summer of Soul.
Musical genius Questlove’s epic revisiting of the biggest music festival you have never heard of takes place in Mount Martha Park, where a musical festival spanning six weekends would eventually draw in a crowd of three hundred thousand. Some of the artists that performed included the likes of Gladys Knight and the Pips, B.B King, Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder. With a cast of such legendary line-ups, the question of how did this festival fly so under the radar, becomes even more prescient. Herein lies the diptych upon which the entire documentary rests. Whilst undeniably the music and the sheer joy the festival inspired amongst the crowd of mostly Black and Latinx faces, is a huge focus of Summer of Soul, concomitantly, so is the inherently political, reactionary and subversive nature that was simultaneously enmeshed alongside each artists’ performance. This festival, taking place a mere hundred miles away from Woodstock, shared virtually none of the countercultural behemoth’s media attention, despite boasting its own firmament of equally legendary musicians. The documentary reveals that whilst the concert was indeed filmed, there was little interest from television networks in broadcasting the footage, thinking that viewership for the film would be miniscule. The Summer of Soul also had to deal with the New York Police Department refusing to provide security to the festival, leaving the festival producer Tony Lawrence (who is also the best dresser of the film), to employ the help of the Black Panther Party, who stepped into the role.
For every dizzyingly high note hit, there was an accompanying, stirring lecture given. The Harlem Cultural Festival was not simply a music festival. It was also a seminar, a symposium for black artists and visionaries to teach the crowd of men, women and children that “Black is Beautiful”. The documentary is punctuated by a bevy of huge cultural moments, like a Black festival attendee who was a journalist at the time, fighting to keep the word ‘Black’, as a descriptor, in her headline, as a means of debunking the idea that ‘Black’ could only ever be a synonym for the negative and the wicked. The moon landing, perennially remembered as a Herculean event that is to this day hailed as one of the pinnacles of humankind’s achievements, is completely flipped on its head in Summer of Soul. The moon landing took place during the course of the festival, leaving many news outlets wondering how and why such a huge crowd could be gathered in a park, listening to music, rather than staying in and watching this gargantuan event on television. Interviews are spliced in between the roaring music, with the main consensus being “why try and go to space when we have plenty of people in need of help here?”. For many, the space race was nothing more than a waste of money, an event that could not even hold a candle to the Black excellence occurring day after day at this spectacular festival.
The Harlem Cultural Festival completely embodies the spirit of the sixties. The electricity of change in the air, paired with the kind of music that can only be born out of intense political dissonance and revolution, as well as the most fabulous outfits both onstage and off, all work together to produce the most vivid and vibrant documentary film of recent times. Summer of Soul is undoubtedly a stunning blend of art and rebellion not likely to ever be seen again on our screens.
Follow Aimee on Instagram.
Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is playing as part of ACMI’s Days of Summer program, Saturday 17 Dec 2022 to Tuesday 14 Feb 2023. For tickets and more info, click here.