The Brooklyn Rail

In the past four decades, British filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien has become widely celebrated for his pioneering body of work, which combines avant-garde film techniques with an incisive gaze at the politico-historical tumult of our world and a careful grip on the intellectual and philosophical currents that have shaped modernity. Julien has become known for his multi-channel installations that situate the viewer in multiple, dizzying temporalities: past, present, and future often collide across the screens, yielding a contrapuntal and fractured visual poetics that requires the viewer to reckon with the discomfiting variegatedness of the political and historical realities we inhabit.

One such work is Lessons of the Hour, a 2019 film which is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art as a ten-channel installation. The film, which first emerged out of a commission from the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, probes the life and mind of Frederick Douglass—the great abolitionist and pioneering philosopher of justice, race, and aesthetics. Douglass, the most photographed person of the nineteenth century, is brought to light in the film as essential to our understanding of the politics of representation and self-fashioning. Julien also illuminates Douglass’s searing contemporary relevance by including recent footage of the uprisings that ensued in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. The film is one of several which engages Black intellectual history—among them Once Again (Statues Never Die), a 2022 film that engages the life of Alain Locke, currently on view in the Whitney Biennial.

Zoë Hopkins (Rail): Isaac, congratulations on the screening of Lessons of the Hour (2019) at MoMA, and on your inclusion in the Whitney Biennial this year with Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2024).

Isaac Julien: That’s very kind.

Rail: To begin, I want to talk about how the meaning of Lessons of the Hour has evolved for you. It was first conceived in 2019. And a whole world of things has happened since then. For starters, the global protests of 2020 had not yet occurred. Museums were very different places then. So, can you speak a bit about what it means to present this work in 2024, five years after the original exhibition? How has your relationship to or understanding of Lessons of the Hour changed?

Julien: That’s a really interesting question. You are right that the work premiered in 2019, but it was conceived a few years prior to that. Lessons of the Hour was initially a commission by the Memorial Art Gallery that came about through a long series of conversations with John Hanhardt, the legendary moving image curator. He invited me to go to Rochester, which is actually where he grew up, and took me to Highland Park on the 6th of March 2016. It was there that I came across the Frederick Douglass statue next to a dismembered statue of Goethe. It was really from that point, and also from going to Frederick Douglass’s grave, that I started thinking about his legacy—although I first came across his work much earlier, through the writings of Skip Gates (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), in his essay “Frederick Douglass and the Language of the Self” from Figures in Black (1989). The more that I read about Douglass, the more the things that he was saying in the nineteenth-century began resonating for the present. I didn’t know he was the most photographed person in the United States at that time, or that he wrote four philosophical essays on photography, or that he was an art collector. I discovered all of this from the new scholarship on Douglass and accompanying Celeste-Marie Bernier to Washington, DC, to Douglass’ house museum in Cedar Hill, which is astonishingly well-preserved and features in the beginning of the film. Ray Fearon was cast in the role of Frederick Douglass—Fearon has Shakespearean training and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Douglass was an avid reader of Shakespeare, and Fearon immediately recognized all the Shakespearean references in Douglass’s writing. He obviously mastered the English language and was able to eloquently and astutely write and articulate his oratory. It’s all really important in thinking about the questions that we’ve been involved in more recently. While making the film, we discovered that Douglass may have lived a couple of streets away from where Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore in 2015, hence the use of the FBI footage of the Freddie Gray riots at the end of the film. We’ve had lots of riots in Britain as well, in the 2000s, usually sparked by police brutality. The first work that I made, Who Killed Colin Roach?, which was in 1983, deals with police brutality directly. This all came back and haunted my making of Lessons of the Hour. “Lessons of the Hour” was one of Douglass’s last lectures, about lynching in the nineteenth century, and we can transpose it onto all of the subsequent examples of Black Lives Matter protests into the twenty-first century. I just felt like there was an incredible resonance, that Douglass was aware of all of the things we’re still involved in.

Rail: You brought up the fact that Douglass was the most photographed man of the nineteenth century and that he also wrote those four important lectures on photography. Unfortunately, he remains such an overlooked voice in photography history, even though he was way before Walter Benjamin, way before Roland Barthes, way before Susan Sontag. Certainly, Douglass was among the first intellectuals to take the peculiar ontology of photography seriously. He was also serious about its political stakes, particularly for those who have been excluded from the realm of representation or from the category of the human altogether. I appreciate that the installation of Lessons of the Hour at MoMA begins with a photograph of Douglass, which is hung in a vitrine just before the screening room, and that there are also moments in the film that show Douglass in a photography studio. Could you speak about how you have related to Douglass as an image maker, in particular as someone who is interested in lens-based media? How has his work on photography and images been important to your own work?

Julien: Well, there’s a certain synonymous, cross-historical identification that’s taking place. I see the camera as an apparatus which created a certain autonomy, the conditions to possess the means to control representation and its reproduction. I have also always seen photography as a non-neutral technology. Therefore, the intervention that I am making in my works, in my films and images, has always been to uncover this raison d’être of picture-making. Someone like Douglass is also thinking about how images can be marshaled to contest the regime of pathological stereotyping that is being asserted at his time. Douglass was very deliberate about the way he was photographed, and had never been photographed against any pastoral scene, it was always a blank screen—tabula rasa. And of course, he’s never smiling, due to the obvious circulation of racial stereotyping, until he’s older, right? It is a kind of politics of racial uplift but it’s very specific. The idea of “picture-making” is also in his oratory, and in the production of the North Star. He is aware that there are many forms of “picture-making,” and he realizes that one has to possess the means of production, the production of the North Star newspaper, to disseminate pictures. I feel that photography for Douglass can be connected to the debates about representational technologies today, which have a certain kind of cynicism and darkness to them. Not to say that Douglass wasn’t aware of the fact that nineteenth-century technologies also had inherent biases, depending who was photographing and disseminating the image.

There is a certain nihilism to technologies today. There’s also a certain passion in creating them, which I think is impossible not to recognize, but these technologies have sinister roles to play in society. I’m involved in making artworks which want to have a certain criticality. Douglass develops a philosophical aesthetics on the role of photography. I think he’s incredibly complex. I’m really surprised that there is so little mention of Douglass’s theories in writing on the history of photography and representation, especially in American contexts.

Rail: Thankfully, we have scholarship from folks like Skip Gates, and others like Shawn Michelle Smith and Maurice O. Wallace, who titled their book Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity after Douglass’s speech “Pictures and Progress.” So hopefully that record of neglect of Douglass’s photographic philosophy is being corrected.

Julien: Yes, my work has relied on such scholarship. I’ve been working with Celeste-Marie Bernier who is an amazing Douglass scholar. She is about to release a whole multi-volume publication on Anna Murray Douglass. I worked very closely with Celeste on Lessons of the Hour. In that sense, my work has been in conversation with this scholarship, but then there’s also something else that my work is involved in, which is the translation of the aesthetic dimensions of the scholarship. If you’re making a moving-image work or film in relationship to Douglass you have to bring him alive into the twenty-first century but also try to pay certain respects to the trajectory of the historical and visual terrains of moving-image cultures in the nineteenth century.

Rail: Earlier, you used the word sinister to describe technology—especially contemporary technology. I’m curious to probe this a bit more. More than once in Lessons of the Hour, we come face to face with the dark underbelly of image production. In the opening, we see the early complicity of photography in producing Black bodies as killable and violable spectacles: there’s an image of a lynched body’s feet hanging from a tree. And then, later in the film, we see surveillance footage of the Freddie Gray riots—which was captured by the FBI, that footage. There are these intense moments of imaged violence throughout the film. But there’s also a real sense of romance and beauty, particularly in the way that the land is rendered in the shots of Scotland, and even those trees from the opening which are really majestic. Could you talk a little bit about that, that bind between violence and romance? What is Lessons of the Hour trying to provoke through that tension?

Julien: In one of his texts, Douglass talks about being a child and seeing the trees and not quite understanding this disfiguration that is part of the trees. He argues that the perspective from which a thing is viewed “is of some importance.” That idea is precisely what led me to the visual methodology at the end of Lessons of the Hour, in my choice of footage from these airborne surveillance cameras in the twenty-first century, during the Freddie Gray riots. Immediately, when I saw this imagery, it reminded my editor and me of war. This machinic eye also foretells the way in which populations may be treated in the future. I chose those aerial shots as opposed to other footage that we could have chosen—more, if you like, normative and newsreel worthy footage of people protesting in the streets. But I was interested in this airborne drone view, and weaving those airborne views together with the footage of Fourth of July fireworks, which appear to implode in reverse. For me it’s a comment on the technology, and a way of asking: what are our strategies of viewing and looking at protests today? There was something else I was going to construct at the finale, which I ended up not doing. I was going to attach artificial intelligence identification labels to each member of the audience watching Douglass speak. The idea was to use digital coding that would communicate their identities, and that was going to be the finale, but I thought this would immediately date the work and I thought that I would just be using the technology for its intended use as a mode of surveillance. But every person in the audience is there for a reason. You have Susan B. Anthony in period dress. You have Catherine Hall, a contemporary abolitionist who was married to Stuart Hall. You have my partner, Mark Nash. There’s a lot of different people who are artists, cultural critics, Royal Academicians, gallerists, and writers in the audience. Douglass knew that the technology had this sinister aspect to it, which is precisely why he and his family worked on the production of the North Star, and its dissemination. That’s why he did the speeches, to create other pictures of identification, to contest that sinister, technological way of looking. That’s also where the pastoral landscape becomes important. And where the links between the human and non-human are created. Douglass had written about his envy of horses, for example, but also about his love of horses. In Lessons of the Hour, there are shots of Douglass and a horse, but he’s not on the horse, not riding the horse—there’s an interest in the interrelatedness between species in Douglass’s way of thinking about animals. There’s a whole relationship between animal and man and the human and non-human that I’m also trying to bring into the frame. Maybe it looks like a pastoral, beautiful image, and it is a pastoral, beautiful image, but it’s also a thinking image. Of course, Douglass was someone who was also observing the landscape in a particular manner since he was influenced by Quakers and naturalists. I think the landscape, the sublime, is an important counter image, or counter-imaginary, to the images of death, which were always physically present, and are still there to haunt us in our everyday lives.

Rail: I love that framework of the thinking pastoral. Thank you for furnishing my arsenal of ideas with that.

Julien: [Laughs] People comment on my works and call them very beautiful, but in image making, there’s always a criticality involved in thinking about a kind of visual pleasure.

Rail: And particularly in this moment of climate crisis, the landscape is always a fraught and critical site of inquiry—it is at the center of both our sense of political nihilism and also political possibility.

Julien: It reminds me of Raymond Williams; he always spoke about the bucolic and the fact that you might have beautiful landscapes, but they are embedded with history. I think it’s great, the idea to have, for example, the Scottish islands in the film.

Rail: I wanted to return, if I may, to a point you made earlier about the audience that watches Douglass in Lessons of the Hour, and who’s in that audience. That scene in the lecture hall bewildered me in the best way. You see people who are dressed in nineteenth-century garb, and then you also see people who are dressed in contemporary garb, and Douglass is addressing all of them. Then of course, we see the Freddie Gray riots at the end, after having seen Douglass speak to this epochally mixed audience. And so, it all sort of begs the question for me of… what hour are we in, or what hour are these lessons for? How does the film situate us in time? And what kind of philosophy of history is the film offering us in its way of playing with time?

Julien: That’s one of the things which has most attracted me to making multi-screen works… the way in which time can be transgressed. Of course, in my earlier works, like Looking for Langston (1989), the relationship between the contemporary and the past isn’t always the thing that’s important. What’s important is the transgression of time. Time in Lessons of the Hour is elusive: the work points us to the multi-temporality and simultaneity of time, as it slips backwards and forwards. And that scene with the audience is more explicit about this temporality: you have different characters from different eras and they are all signifying something through this deliberate juxtaposition. This is one of the things which I find really very exciting about the use of parallel montage and of the multiple screen work, that you can have these sorts of transitions and associations. The art historian Jennifer A. González has coined the term “poetics of attention” to describe this sort of identification, re-looking, or looking in a slightly different manner. I think there’s a kind of visual pedagogy to this strategy, which I’m interested in, which I hope is not too teacherly. I see it as being a little bit more playful, and inviting the audience to see in different ways. The idea of time travel has always been important in my works. And certainly, it’s important that these particular moments remind you that the work was made today. It asks: what political time are we in today? It feels like right now we’re in a time where there’s a nostalgia for something that never was. That’s why there’s been this deliberate attack on monuments and on the idea that time is fixed within these art forms. And then there’s the way that this has given rise to the defense of monuments in terms of white supremacy. There’s a challenge there in the reauthorization of time that takes on different perspectives. I see Lessons of the Hour as contributing to this conversation in remembering a particular figure which can resonate today.

Rail: The question of how the film is involved with or alluding to our current debate around monuments is an interesting one. Of course, when we’re thinking about photographs, particularly portraits, they function very similarly to monuments, in that they are both thought to index or reify the memory of the individual. That brings me to a scene in the film, where we see photographs developing in a fixing bath. We see them sort of coming to life and emerging into being. This moment of mutation feels, to me, like a challenge to the idea of the photographs being a fixed document. Rather, photographs appear here as living documents, as mutable signs. The very process of their making involves change and instability. So the film is getting at a philosophy of time as unstable, but also a certain philosophy of photography as unstable.

Julien: Ever since Looking for Langston in 1989, a lot of my work has been about photography. It comes up more explicitly in certain works, like Once Again… (Statues Never Die) but, once one discovers all the sort of aesthetic philosophical theses that Douglass wrote around photography… it’s a goldmine, in terms of how you can think about making work. But at the same time, one wouldn’t be naive enough to think that what we’re inhabiting today is so similar to Douglass’s times. All of these aspects around indexicality, mimicry, and AI, around what essentially is manipulation of representation, can make one perhaps correctly distrust the image. We know about the sort of non-neutrality of technologies and their role, and how they can be appropriated by the right, and also in relationship to civic injustice. I see all of these works as poetic and literary interventions.

Rail: Speaking of the literary, we hear, in Lessons of the Hour, not only excerpts of the “Lecture on Pictures” but also two other speeches: there are selections from the titular speech “Lessons of the Hour,” which he gave several times and in several locations in the penultimate year of his life. And then we hear snippets of “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in that culminating scene. And it was a fascinating interplay for me. I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit about what led you to select those three specific speeches? Why, for you, did that triangulation work effectively in this context?

Julien: As I’ve mentioned, I was working fairly closely with Celeste-Marie Bernier, the Frederick Douglass scholar, and also with Ray Fearon, who plays Douglass. To a certain extent, there’s a certain amount of montage in the way these speeches are arranged in the film: they’re snippets. We had to go where we thought would really resonate. For example, in “Lecture on Pictures,” I was compelled by his fascination with the new technology of that time. And his interest in art and technology and picturing, I thought that was quite astonishing. Of course, sometimes when he gave his lectures on photography, people wondered, what the hell is he talking about? [Laughter] You’re meant to come here to talk to us about abolition, and you’re giving a lecture on photography? It’s that relationship and schism that I wanted to make clear. The finale involves “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” One thinks of America and one thinks immediately of nationhood. Douglass was interested in complicating this idea of nationhood. And he was pursuing a critique of the whole enlightenment project too. In “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” he’s really demonstrating that critique of civil society, and public discourses. It’s disavowing—the whole critique around nationalism. I think it’s a play with and against these forms of identification.

Rail: What’s interesting about that scene is that in addition to the Freddie Gray footage, we’re also getting footage from the Baltimore Harbor. I was particularly struck by the sight of the Domino Sugar Factory on the harbor. And I was thinking, of course, of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014). And of course, it explicitly situates us in the reality of racial capitalism and its conceits.

Julien: It very much signifies the British West Indian point of view, because sugar plantations were so important to the economy of enslavement there. As soon as I saw that the Domino factory could also be in the shot, I wanted to have that image.

Rail: I’m glad it’s in there; it works so effectively. Isaac, you have another work on view in New York as we speak, called Once again… (Statues never Die) which is part of the Whitney Biennial. It’s interesting to me that both Lessons of the Hour and Statues Never Die are dealing with these searingly brilliant Black intellectuals. We have Douglass in the one, and in the other we have Alain Locke. How are these films dealing with or framing the idea of the Black public intellectual?

Julien: Alain Locke is someone who I came across quite early on, in the early 1980s, reading about the Harlem Renaissance and realizing that within my own art historical education, I had never been taught about the Harlem Renaissance. One had to teach oneself. But it became a sort of passion of mine to be able to revisit Alain Locke. To review the collection of Albert Barnes through Locke’s eyes was incredibly exciting to me. And of course, the twist is in how the film relates to queer desire. It’s also a work which is looking at the question of restitution, specifically in the context of African art and its modernist project in the west. It’s thinking about how the legacy of modernism is haunting the present in relationship to the contemporary debates in art and in museum culture, generally. Alain Locke was a philosopher and art critic who had a lot of interesting ideas. I’m attracted to people who have interesting and odd ideas. I guess they’re called intellectuals, but I just call them people who have interesting and odd ideas. One of the first films I made when I was in the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, The Passion of Remembrance, was a work which was looking at questions of phallocentrism in the Black Power movement. And that work, which I made in the collective that was constituted mainly of women, Black women, was really something which has stayed with me. One of the things that I’ve thought a lot about, and I’ve been in lots of discussions with Celeste-Marie Bernier around, is Anna Murray Douglass, and the way that she is not thought of as an intellectual, which of course is not true—but Douglass scholars haven’t been bothered to do the scholarship. That needs some correction. One of the things that I want to do—which may seem a bit circumnavigational—is to make a counter work to Lessons of the Hour.

Rail: Featuring Anna Murray?

Julien: Precisely. This is an interest of mine: whose labor gets classified as intellectual activity, from usually a phallocentric point of view in a more classical sense? This is one of the reasons why I want to focus on Anna Murray Douglass’s sartorial labor in the construction of Frederick Douglass’s costumery in Lessons of the Hour. I see this as a genuine intellectual intervention, and I’ve always been astounded by how she hasn’t been fully recognized. And I remember when I was making my original research in the early eighties around Looking for Langston and seeing a similar erasure of the labor of Black queer culture.

Rail: Isaac, I just want to end by saying that I’m profoundly and immensely grateful for your brilliance. And I feel so lucky to have shared this conversation with you.

Julien: Well thank you for your wonderful questions, as well.