A film about Harlem race riots was still screening downtown when Harlem erupted.

Evidence

The Cool World, opened in April 1964, two days before the Fair, at the fashionable Cinema II on Third Avenue. There were positive notices in both the Amsterdam News and the New York Times, where critic Bosley Crowther called it a film of “pounding vitality” that “gives the shattering details of an excellent newspaper exposé.” Downtown at the Voice, Andrew Sarris was more uneasy, complaining that “by the end of The Cool World, the white race has been reduced to an alien presence from another planet.” The Cool World was still playing downtown at the Art, a movie house on Eighth Street, when Harlem exploded. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 552

Categorization

• CANDY: The eerie juxtaposition — a race-riot film still on the marquee when the real riot began — is a striking cocktail-party fact.
• XREF: The riot-film-still-playing-during-riot echoes the reader’s counterculture-to-market arc: art and political rupture sharing a single moment and location.