Time

“On its surface, Garrett Bradley’s Time asks a simple question: How can you convey the full length of 21 years in the span of a single film, let alone a documentary that runs just 81 minutes? And from its degraded opening images—borrowed from the first of a thousand video messages that a black Louisiana woman named Sibil Fox Richardson (aka “Fox Rich”) recorded for her husband as she waited for him to be released from State Penitentiary—offers a similarly simple answer: You don’t measure it in length but rather in loss. You measure time in absence. In the undertows of anger that swirl under the water and threaten to sweep you out to sea. In the punitive aftertaste of forcing six boys to grow up without a father. In the way that their mother, a determined but soft spoken 27 year old when she made that initial tape, has hardened into a social justice warrior of such indomitable strength that she could single handedly restore that term to power it implies. You don’t think of time as a bridge that stretches between past and future, but as the boundless present that flows below; infinite along one axis, but so narrow along the other that you can barely see the distance between shores. Swirled together from 18 years’ worth of MiniDV tapes (in addition to the newer, more pristine footage the filmmaker shot of Fox and her family before that incredible treasure trove of home video dumped in her lap), Bradley’s monumental and enormously moving Time doesn’t juxtapose the pain of yesterday against the hope of tomorrow so much as it insists upon a perpetual now. And while the documentary never reduces its subject to mere symbols of oppression they represent—the films couldn’t be more personal, and it builds to a moment of such unvarnished intimacy that you can hardly believe what you’re watching—Bradley’s Tralfamadorian editing flattens time in a way that contextualizes mass incarceration on the largest of continuums. Time in name and timeless style, this liquid history streams centuries of subjugation into a single confluence of dehumanization until black slavery and the prison-industrial complex become two separate brooks that feed into the same river. -David Ehrlich