There is a screen with a target at the center, and it is Baltimore. There is a screen of Frederick Douglass, and it is Baltimore. There is, at the entrance, a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass, his letters, in his hand, his image, his manner.
Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” (2019) is closing soon at MoMA, so I went down to the second floor to see it. I caught the last few minutes, a train across the 10 screens, a sound of churning industry. A voice raging against his own dehumanization to people who applaud. The film ends, and in the dimly lit room, the people file out, and file back in.
Back to the opening, and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and it is Baltimore when Freddy Gray was murdered, when Douglass was there, when we cross time and we hear his words, a glimmering sea, a journey to Europe. What is 200 years? What changes?
The 10 screens are hung from the ceiling, four are large, and six are medium and small. Douglass is played by an actor, who voices portions of the speech and his letters. Douglass wears a cobalt blue coat. Appears in a tree from which a man is lynched, a tree of tiny yellow flowers. Wears a deep burgundy coat in a field as the beating drum of a woodpecker whirs across the room.
There is a cello, a violin, a piano. A statue of Douglass, a painting, a photograph. A clock ticking, a sewing machine that his first wife Anna Murray Douglas is using, a machine that blends into the sound of a train billowing a trail of smoke through the America of this violence, this noise (this weather, Christina Sharpe might say). The sound of a whip, the sound of picking cotton. “My back is scarred by the lash,” Douglass says. And then we see his back. And then we see how he writes his letters with a fountain pen, and it is a mark and a mark, and they are not the same.
I do not want to interpret the work so much as think with its rendering of history a malleable, viscous material. I felt the critique of portraiture. I felt the dwelling on how the women in his life offered more than is often credited. I felt how the crossing of sound and time and image—a film about imagery, and a film about a subject that rendered himself an image, and also more than an image—was at times achieved with the subtle fading of one image into the next, and at times with a jolting juxtaposition of past and present. Time is like that, behind and in front. Around. Rounding.