Isaac Julien Reinvents the Biopic in Works at MoMA, the Whitney

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Shortly after the opening title card appears in Isaac Julien’s 45-minute film Looking for Langston (1989), a fuzzy voice can be heard. Set against a black screen, the voice, appropriated from a 1967 radio broadcast, promises a memoriam program for the deceased Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who will be remembered here via “a blending of memory, tributes, and his own words.” This is a clever fib on Julien’s part: what follows is hardly about Hughes. 

More than a straightforward cinematic portrait of this monumental figure, Looking for Langston is a revisionist evocation of the queer milieu in which Hughes may have moved. In one sequence in the film’s middle section, beefy boys caress one another in bed; toward the end, Black men in ’20s garb twirl to ’80s beats at a gay club. A more conventional film would have traced Hughes’s rise as a writer and taken stock of his leftist politics. But Julien doesn’t explicitly portray any of this, because he was instead focused specifically on countering the “heteronormative aspect of how the [writer’s] estate had created Langston,” as he put it in a 2022 interview for the Museum of Modern Art. If biographies are “created,” as Julien says, then Looking for Langston presents a new spin, showing queerness as essential to Hughes’ story, and filling a gap that Julien felt was missing from the history books. 

Twenty-five years have passed since Looking for Langston, which is now on view in a gallery about the Harlem Renaissance at MoMA. In that time, Julien has continued his project of reinventing the biopic genre, flirting with its conventions while also chafing against them. You can see this in two other recent video installations now on view in New York—one also at MoMA, the other at the Whitney Museum. In all three, he takes up storied figures of Black history, resisting history lessons and clichés in the process. 

Both installations have the sheen of mid-budget Hollywood filmmaking. In the Frederick Douglass–centric Lessons of the Hour (2019), at MoMA, there are sweeping shots of picturesque landscapes and sun-splashed images of the protagonist hard at work. But Oscar bait, this is not: Julien splits his imagery across 10 screens, such that one sequence in which Douglass rides a steam locomotive is seen from many different perspectives at once, all playing simultaneously, while shots of a Black seamstress at work appear in between on select screens. 

Biopics traditionally tend toward clarity, parceling out bite-sized insights into the lives of presidents, artists, and activists. Lessons of the Hour, on the other hand, is a confounding experience that deliberately does not offer a coherent portrait of the abolitionist, who was himself imaged in countless ways as the most photographed person of the 19th century. These elegant refractions are echoed in Once Again… (Statues Never Die), a 2022 video installation included in the Whitney Biennial. That work’s reflective walls cause the piece’s five screens to tessellate across the space, confusing the eye. 

Here, the installation’s main subject is Alain Locke, a leading philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. In black-and-white footage, Locke is shown traipsing through the open-storage facilities of museums such as the Barnes Collection, whose founder, Albert C. Barnes, engages Locke in a dialogue on African art’s influence on European modernism. Recent biopics like Napoleon and Ferrari are loaded with scenes that reconstruct unknowable conversations had behind closed doors, but in those films, such talks drive forward plot and character development. Locke and Barnes’s discourse, one of the few sequences here with on-screen dialogue, does nothing of the sort. Instead, based as it is on Barnes and Locke’s exchanges, it aids in Julien’s project of using true people and real events as starting points, then expanding upon them through fiction. The artist cites Saidiya Hartman’s idea of practicing “critical fabulation,” or using extrapolation to remedy archival omissions. 

It can often be difficult to tell where or when parts of Once Again are set, and that’s because Julien has subtly edited in sound and images from Looking for Langston. In Once Again, newly lensed images of Locke ascending a carpeted staircase collide with 25-year-old shots from Looking for Langston that show a Black man with angel wings. In fusing together these two quasi-biopics, Julien suggests that Once Again, a film about a Harlem Renaissance icon who was out to his inner circle, is thematically consistent with its 1989 forebear. Time and space implode as Locke and Hughes intermingle, forming a universe that is all their own.