SUMMER OF SOUL: FILM REVIEW
“It was like nothing I had ever heard in my life,” a Harlem Culture Festival attendant said of the pivotal series of concerts that took place in Harlem during the summer of 1969. “Before that, the world was black and white. The concert took my life into color.” He pauses, “But then the festival was forgotten.”
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is a time capsule of the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival — a musical celebration of Black culture that not only drew more than 300,000 people, but had a lineup that included Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight, and B.B. King to name a few. Despite this fact, the festival was not of much interest to the rest of the world — most of whom were preoccupied with events such as Woodstock and the moon landing.
Up until this point, the Harlem Culture Festival was not written into pop-cultural history — not through film or any other type of storytelling vehicle. The 47 reels of breathtaking concert footage in Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) has been sitting in the basement of television director Hal Tulchin for almost 50 years. Tulchin recorded all six concerts, but when he tried to sell the footage to news channels and media companies, no one was interested. Tulchin says he even tried to market the festival as “Black Woodstock.” Nobody cared.
Thompson not only carefully curates live concert footage of the Harlem Culture Festival, but also historically contextualizes the event, reminding viewers of the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedys, whose deaths all occurred in the summers prior. The festival’s attendees and its performers are filled with equally as much energy as tired rage — and the concerts served as a direct response to the nonstop violence and losses of Black activists and community members. Thompson emphasized the Harlem Culture Festival’s role as a vehicle for social justice and made such a point clear by contrasting the revolutionary nature of the festival with the rest of the nation's fixation on becoming a global superpower while failing to take care of many of its own people.
Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) also reminds us that Black culture is generational, through featuring testimonies from the children, friends, and those influenced by many of the groundbreaking Black performers. “My dad put out a song called ‘It’s Time,’” Raoul Roach, son of jazz drummer and composer Max Roach, spoke of his father’s music. “He was not trying to be slick and have a message. No, that is the message. It’s our time. It’s time. Do it now. We want liberation.”
Thompson’s revival of the Harlem Culture Festival not only provides visibility to an event many did not even know existed, but also preserves moments that only existed in the memories of a select few. The film closes with a testimony from attendee Musa Jackson, who watches footage of the festival with tears streaming down his face. “You put memories away, and you don’t realize… sometimes you don’t even know if they’re real,” he tells Questlove offscreen. “I knew I wasn’t crazy. But now I know that I’m not. And this is just confirmation — not only that, but also how beautiful it was.”