Five Things to Know about Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour

Montage is an important technique in Julien’s nonlinear storytelling.

The 10 screens of Lessons of the Hour allow for simultaneous scenes and images. Julien has described this technique as “horizontal montage,” a way to explore nonlinear storytelling in the editing of the film and the spatial environment of the installation. In the film’s opening sequence, Douglass, played by actor Ray Fearon, walks through an autumnal landscape. The sound of chirping birds and his footsteps in the grass unify the audio, but he appears on two of the screens shot from disparate angles. The other screens feature repeating and mirrored images of orange and yellow leaves hanging from tree limbs. In a related sequence not long after, a lynching scene from Oscar Micheaux’s silent film Within Our Gates (1920) appears as grainy black-and-white footage on one screen, interrupting the brilliant color of the foliage and the false tranquility of the setting.³ Julien’s horizontal montage moves between the past and present through found footage, digital video, and 35mm film. The choice of montaged elements also alludes to one of the subjects of Douglass’s last major speech—the atrocious lynchings of Black men spreading across the country.⁴ Lessons of the Hour takes its name from that lecture.

As the most photographed man in 19th-century America, Douglass knew the medium’s power.

Much of Julien’s work investigates the relationship among different media technologies and the modes of representation they make possible; Lessons of the Hour presents historical photographic processes using film and video. Douglass is a particularly apt subject in this regard because of his prescient understanding of the political and social value of photography, which he saw as a tool to counteract racist stereotypes. The first work that visitors encounter in Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour is a whole-plate daguerreotype of Douglass made by the studio Southworth and Hawes. Albert Sands Southworth, founder of the firm, may have donated it to a fundraiser for the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Boston in December 1845.⁶ The publication of Narrative earlier that year had increased Douglass’s national celebrity—and endangered him. Douglass was free from slavery’s physical bonds, but not yet from its legal ones. These events precipitated his 19 months abroad in England, Ireland, and Scotland, a period captured in Lessons of the Hour. In fact, Julien modeled his main character on the Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype, referencing the hairstyle, clothing style, and overall bearing that Douglass presents in it.⁷

Julien shows how women played a key role in Frederick Douglass’s story.

Lessons of the Hour provides an expanded view of Douglass through important figures in his life, especially the women who were his interlocutors, confidants, or partners. Among them are Anna and Ellen Richardson, English Quakers who purchased Douglass’s manumission from his enslaver, allowing him to safely return to the United States from Great Britain. The film also imagines Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick’s first wife and an Underground Railroad conductor, posing for her portrait in the studio of J. P. Ball, one of the first renowned African American photographers. Frederick can be found in Ball’s salon with historical figures such as the suffragist Susan B. Anthony; the social reformer Rosetta Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s daughter and editor and proofreader of his work; and feminist and abolitionist Ottilie Assing. In another scene, Helen Pitts, Douglass’s wife after Anna’s death, looks through his second autobiography at the Douglass family home, Cedar Hill. Whether publicly or privately, all these women participated in the struggle for racial and social equality alongside Douglass.¹¹