TV REVIEWS : Powerful ‘Frederick Douglass’ Portrait

In a marriage made in television documentary heaven, filmmaker Orlando Bagwell meets historical figure Frederick Douglass in “Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History,” the closest thing we are likely to see as the definitive audiovisual portrait of abolitionist Douglass’ adventurous life.

Bagwell and his visually poetic films (“Roots of Resistance” among them) are a living argument for publicly funded television, and Douglass was his own best living case for the quashing of slavery and racism.

Blending typically elegant original images with a range of perspectives from various historians, Bagwell avoids overdoing both the talking head and artificial re-creation scenes. As we learn of Douglass’ early years as an innocent child sent to a huge plantation, Bagwell creates poignant silhouetted images suggesting the loneliness of slavery and the separation of families.

Indeed, the film’s very beauty threatens to mitigate against slavery’s barbarism; the filmmaker remains very dependent on Douglass’ own vivid prose to press the issue (spoken by Charles S. Dutton with a power this actor usually reserves for the stage).

Short of reading Douglass’ three autobiographies, the viewer will not get a more detailed telling of Douglass’ life than this--from his seeming release from the plantation, to his near-surrender under the whip of a “slave breaker,” to his marriage late in life to a white suffragist. Like a writer struggling to find his own voice, Douglass fought to establish his unique perspective as an ex-slave bearing witness to what he considered to be American liberty’s greatest challenge.

Bagwell and his historians describe how Douglass had to battle as much against the presumptions and strategies of his white abolitionist allies as he did against slavery’s advocates.

Unlike many radical abolitionists, Douglass was shrewd--knowing, for instance, that John Brown’s plan to stage an armed slave revolt in 1859 was folly. Douglass was the ultimate burr in Abraham Lincoln’s side, as he pressed and cajoled and lectured the president to turn the Civil War into a war about freedom.

Still, Bagwell doesn’t suggest the slightest flaw or hint of ego in the man. It must have been there, but this is a history story with a hero, and it’s Douglass as a lion that holds forth.

Though he died while agitating against the 1890s wave of lynching, the Douglass of this film lives through America’s growing-up years, when the country’s laws moved closer to his moral view of the world.

* “Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History” airs 9 p.m. tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.