VIDEO: Garrett Bradley-Revolutions
Garrett Bradley is an US artist, educator, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose work spans narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships and sociopolitical histories within the United States. In 2020, Bradley presented her debut feature-length documentary, “Time”, which was nominated for more than fifty awards—including an Oscar—and won twenty, including the 2020 Peabody Award and the Best Director Award in the US Documentary Competition category at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, making her the first Black woman to receive the award in the history of the festival.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Eye Filmmuseum Arhive
Garrett Bradley invites us to take a step back and consider how and in what ways looking is socially and culturally informed. In doing so, she points to the pitfalls of representation and unravels the mechanisms that determine how we perceive ourselves and others. The exhibition “Revolutions” takes its title from the various forms of revolution present in Garrett Bradley’s work. A revolution can refer to a political shift in power, but also to a cycle, like the Earth rotating on its axis as the days pass. Bradley’s work reveals the revolutionary potential of the everyday – the change that small acts of resistance can bring about. Garrett Bradley creates courageous, visually compelling work, which takes on themes including racism and exclusion with exceptional energy. Her work takes shape through a blend of diverse archival media. Her (documentary) films and installations refer to topics including the history of American citizens, the struggle for social justice and the political history of the United States, and make in-depth explorations of human emotions such as rage and sorrow. Bradley’s 13-minute documentary film “Alone” (2017), like her feature documentary film, “Time”, focuses on incarceration in the United States from what Bradley has described as a “distinctly Black southern, feminist perspective.” The short features Aloné Watts, a young woman whose boyfriend is incarcerated. The film depicts Watts’ everyday life as she considers her future with her boyfriend; Fox Rich, protagonist of “Time”, appears in the short. “Alone” premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival where it was awarded the Short Form Jury Award in nonfiction and was released by the New York Times OpDocs. In 2020, Bradley presented her debut feature-length documentary, “Time”, which was nominated for over 57 awards and twenty wins including an Academy Award nomination, 2020 Peabody Award, and Best Director Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition category at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Her debut feature was also included in Time Magazine’s “25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance and The Hollywood Reporter’s “Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the 50 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far)” list. “Safe” (2022) is the second in a trilogy of short films that explore the nuanced overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives. The film succeeds “AKA” (2019), a cinematic meditation on the intergenerational relationships between mothers and daughters which probes the interconnection of white and black women, as it is portrayed in classic American cinema. If “AKA” looked to exterior relationships, “Safe” focuses on inner life, which the artist likens to “entire worlds which may be elusive or indiscernible, but remain vivid, infinite and parallel to the outside world.” Working again with Donna Crump (America) and Aloné Watts (Alone, America), this new work explores an attempt to capture the ineffable nature of interior emotions. Seizing on the medium’s predicament of expression – given that the interior is not discursive and cannot be fully represented – Bradley suggests that the interior is a radical, even political space of Black life that is often dismissed for its resistance to description; in this case, one’s ability to visualize intuition, instinct and an increasing sense of paralysis in modern life. Visual metaphor is treated as a means to approximate interior emotion (and lesser-known histories), which Bradley suggests as a potent and meaningful form of human expression. Exhibited as a three-channel film, the work utilises both black-and-white and color, 35mm film and HD video. Bradley’s soundscapes draw from the exterior world (street corners, city sirens, public parks), and include evocative fragments of language which are directly culled from research.
Photo: Garrett Bradley, AKA (still), 2019. Single channel video (color, sound); 8:17 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
Info: Eye Filmmuseum, IJpromenade 1, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 14/6-7/9/2025, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, www.eyefilm.nl/
