The Ambiguity of Blackness: A Review of Garrett Bradley’s Film Time, by Channing Smith
This week, we present the very first dispatch by our founding volunteer Channing Smith, a senior documentary film major at St. John’s.
The conviction of innocence or guilt was never enough to sway filmmaker Garrett Bradley from creating yet another masterpiece. Time is as much a documentary fighting for exposure to the world of incarceration, as it is a family narrative that exists on a continuum of time and space. Bradley’s experimental approach to filmmaking is a force to be reckoned with in the world of cinema and art - as her work effortlessly falls into both categories. Prior to creating Time, Bradley’s first Sundance win for Short Film Jury Award in Nonfiction was for a project titled Alone (2017) where she followed a woman who was struggling with the idea of marrying someone behind bars. In a way, Alone and Time are woven together - Bradley has even been quoted saying the two are “sister films.”
Time follows mother, wife, and formerly incarcerated prison abolitionist, Sibil “Fox” Richardson as she fights for the release of her incarcerated husband, Robert Richardson, who fell victim to harsh over-sentencing. She, too, served time for the same crime of attempted robbery - but Time is about so much more than that. Instead of attempting to be a prose piece about the for-profit carceral system, Time presents incarceration as a shared family experience whose daily life is impacted beyond the walls of prison. Interestingly enough, Bradley had a complete cut of the film before Fox Rich even told her she had a slew of home videos that documented her daily family life spanning the years of her husband’s incarceration. The work is primarily composed of the Richardson family’s home videos, but Bradley is able to turn their personal accounting of history into a rich yet ambiguous narrative of family, strife, joy, and Blackness. Time is a refreshing and much needed exposition of humanity rather than the inhumanness of incarceration - because we know that side, or at least we should already know.
In Black cinema, experimental is a genre that is often avoided. Bradley’s work is neither black nor white. While her most work is literally black and white, Bradley lets Black stories exist in the gray area, in ambiguity. Not everything about the experience she captures has to be explained, but rather felt.
Sibil “Fox” Richardson, a still from Time on the day Robert Richardson was released.
For 81 minutes, I was engulfed in a story that could have very easily been the story of my family as I’ve grown up in the Deep South. Yet, I was leaving the film not with a sense of dense traumatization but rather a greater understanding of Fox’s daily heroism, her boundless strength - both which demanded her endurance. It is no surprise that this very documentary won Garrett Bradley the award for Best Director for U.S. Documentary, the first Black woman to ever win the award in the festival’s 43 year history. Now Time is nominated for Best Documentary Feature! Personally, I wanted that to be me but I’ll graciously let Garrett have it! As a filmmaker and personal fan of Garrett Bradley, I was deeply moved by the ambiguity of not only Time but America. I saw Bradley present this film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and conversed with her afterward - major fangirl moment. No seriously, I bawled as soon as I left the theater!
Garrett Bradley has an amazing way of utilizing archival footage and completing turning it on its head without disrupting the narrative of what’s going on - only adding to it. In Time, I felt completely immersed in Fox’s world, as if I was one of her children she was practicing French homework with. Bradley’s work has a way of making her characters dance the most choreographed steps, without letting you know that you’re at the biggest ball of the year. Garrett Bradley’s work marks our existence, as Black people, as something not bound to time and space as we know it; she marks our existence as infinite.
Sibil “Fox” Richardson and family.
Channing Smith is an emerging documentary filmmaker. After finishing her undergraduate studies in December 2021, she plans to work at the crux of artistry, race, and social justice.