We walk in silvery light between freestanding screens and reflective mylar walls, and watch in a wintry garden outside Philadelphia. We sit in the gloom of Sir John Soane’s Museum, where someone jerks and twists in the doorway, and we float on the Yangtze as though in a Chinese painting. A dancer moulds a head on to his fist in wet clay, while standing in a vertical shaft of sunlight in Bahia, Brazil. Isaac Julien’s film installations take you places and catch you with their innumerable details and juxtapositions.
Light on black skin, shadows on white marble bodies, dry leaves rustling on a tiled floor, snow falling – and magically ascending – from the collar of a young man’s tuxedo. Lithe bodies slide between the sheets, and men in evening dress dance on tables. Here’s an angel, there’s little Jimmy Somerville up on a balcony. Julien can seduce and astonish, beguile and instruct. Walking through woodland, the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass encounters a body dangling from a tree. We only see feet and legs. No rope, no twisted neck. This image appears on just one of the array of 10 screens in Julien’s 2019 Lessons of the Hour, about Douglass’s sojourns and lecture tours in Britain and Ireland. This apparition of lynching is a disquieting memory resurfacing on a quiet walk in the Scottish countryside, a detail among details in this beautifully paced half-hour film.
