Most of us have seen countless photographs and documentaries about the Civil Rights Movement. We have heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches speculating about what may save the soul of America. We have swayed in syncopation to the hymns and freedom songs hanging in the air like incense to cleanse the staleness of unconscionable violence.
Ironically, it’s our familiarity with these images, often broadcast at governmentally sanctioned times while actual civil rights legislation and protections are dismantled, that serves to pacify rather than activate continued liberation movements. This creates an interesting challenge for artists and filmmakers who want to engage these archives to draw corollaries between historical movements and contemporary efforts.
British Ghanaian director Sir John Akomfrah’s new research-intensive film “The Hour of the Dog: Five Parables on Fugitivity and Trespass” complicates this problem by grounding images from the Civil Rights Movement into a larger philosophical investigation of what it means to exist in time.
Each of his projects is haunted by the specters of history, proofs of miraculous bravery or human inaction, climate crisis and mass mobilization across the Black Atlantic. “The Hour of the Dog,” now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, is guided by a metronomic voice-over that chants quotes from theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time.” “Our being is being in time… this is time,” the voice repeatedly invokes. Rovelli’s quotes are a chorus that march alongside the mugshots of brave Freedom Riders, the hateful retorts of George Wallace, the hopeful decrees of Kennedy and King. “This is time…” echoes through the decay of buildings, hums across stoic rooms weighted by the residual evidence of segregation.
“I was interested in that period because it’s clearly a moment when a group of people, mainly young people, decide, OK, we are going to go and perform acts of trespass inside the space. We’re going to say, no, we don’t agree with this, knowing fully well that what they are doing is breaking laws, norms, crossing borders, boundaries and so on,“ Akomfrah told Baltimore Beat in an interview.
Akomfrah’s depiction of the Civil Rights era is compelling because of the way he engages material culture from the era, the literal objects and artifacts of Jim Crow segregation, to tell a story about those times. He makes the objects monumental rather than ornamental by spreading the vestiges of horror and heroism around cleverly staged environments like funerary tributes discovered in unearthed burial grounds.
In Akomfrah’s physics, it is the objects of history that reveal the realities of time. The mugshots of teenage freedom riders; the “white only” and “colored only” signs; the blood-stained, well-worn garments of peaceful marchers; the weaponized fire hoses and the charred bibles from church bombings; the old porcelain and polished silverware from sit-in diners all create an exquisite composite of time.
“I always say the projects are research based, essentially,” he said. “So, what you see is an extracted rationale from that research. It’s a sort of iceberg thing because underneath is another 10 hours that I’ve assembled, which doesn’t get here because you don’t want to show people 10 hours of stuff anyway. It’s like trying to decide what you think best illustrates the thesis that you want to tell. And that’s what takes the time.”
This unique style of montage Akomfrah has mastered over decades of practice allows viewers to feel the spirit of the era he conjures. Akomfrah finds a rhythm in plotting the beats that speak to him about a brief and miraculous movement that stands as a testament to the power of our collective consciousness. When many gather together with integrity we can bend the physics of reality towards justice.
“Reading (“The Order of Time”) it suddenly felt like something that I wanted to connect with so the people understood that, yes, this is time. The ways in which it marks you, the ways in which it sort of situates you,” Akomfrah said. “There is a set of overlapping continuums and you are in it, you know of it, with it, part of it in this flow. When I read that, I thought, Wow, that’s exactly what we want.”
“The Hour of the Dog” is a six-channel film installation that chronicles key years in the Civil Rights Movement (1956-1963), leading up to the March on Washington. The narrative is told in five chapters: I The Family of Things; II The Shadow and The Substance; III The Agony and The Ecstasy; IV The Pain and The Miracle; and V The Flag and The Spirit.
“I called this piece “(Five) Parables” as a subtitle because I was looking for chapters, if you will, moments that seem to me to clarify what was at stake,” Akomfrah said. “There’s always something at stake, but it’s difficult to find forms that allow you to draw them out,” he said.
For Akomfrah, the “paradox of Americanism” was “clearly what was at stake” between 1956 and 1963.
“That Americanism had abrogated for itself the ability to be both highly specific — we’re just for white people — and highly universal,” he said. “We’re Americans who don’t have to listen to all this stuff about universality and the Constitution.”
“The Hour of the Dog” is a meandering film. How could it be anything else? The vastness of history is more than a series of sequential occurrences; it’s an overwhelming fever pitch, myriad spikes in the collective consciousness and quantum experience. What is recalled and encountered shapes our ability to discern humanity’s evolution — what remains unlearned, what remains unhealed? The liminal realm between understanding and willingness to change confounds possibility, complicates time, makes redundant what could be resolved. The work is a reminder to us all to remain unafraid to review what has been so that we can see, with clear intention and real integrity, what can be.
The survivors of Jim Crow segregation as channeled by actors are also necessary artifacts in Akomfrah’s schema of time. They recline amongst the remains, transfixed, caught in the stasis of liminal time. Exorcised by time. Statically reflecting the tragedy and triumph of history as a persistence of time. Men and women stare down the bare fangs of taxidermied dogs. Elders sit alongside vintage television sets broadcasting the speeches that defined the era. The objects of violence and the metaphoric bodies of survivors marked by time sit together, unmoved by the collective recapitulation of time as interpreted by our collective conceptions of history and memory.
But “Hour of the Dog” is also a sobering narrative about all the ways apathy regresses collective momentum. Watching the epic film, I could only feel encouraged by its profound proof that if each generation compels themselves to be liberated, our descendants will inherit a world we have never known but courageously imagine is realizable.
“I think it’s important for us to understand, especially as the attempts to hack away at (history) in the name of moving on,” Akomfrah continued. “Oh, well, we don’t need that anymore. It’s all done now, so we can move on. We’re not quite done yet. Well, it certainly isn’t done with us.”