Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020)

As it happens, I already related most of my thoughts about this incredibly moving film in my third NYFF report for MUBI, which was mostly supposed to focus on the films in the Currents section. But I found unexpected affinities between Time and Edström / Winter's The Works and Days, despite their obvious differences. 

Time is clearly meant to be an accessible, even activist work of political documentary, and the fact that it was co-produced by the New York Times serves to emphasize the extent to which "timeliness" (kairos: that aspect of rhetorical address I discussed in my review of Gianvito's Her Socialist Smile) is a major element not only of Bradley's project but, perhaps more importantly, how it will be positioned for the viewing public. Once it hits Amazon Prime, it will become an unavoidable media talking point, and I sort of suspect that this year's Best Documentary Oscar is Bradley's to lose.

This is all to the good. In the mass protests this summer against unbridled police violence directed at Black bodies, there were forceful calls for police reform and/or defunding. But it is necessary to attack the entirety of systemic racism on all fronts. Time's reminder that the prison-industrial complex still dominates this country is vital, and by highlighting Fox Rich's decades-long personal struggle to free her husband, Bradley's film provides viewers with an accessible "in" to the idea of prison abolition.

But back to The Works and Days. The timeliness and issue-orientation of Time makes it possible that some commentators will overlook the film's poetic strategies, which to my mind are a large part of why it resonates as strongly as it does. The sequences that show the Richardson family simply living their daily lives in Robert's absence (emphasized by a full-size cardboard standee of him in the house) are lent a tremendous gravity, not unlike the work rituals we watch Tayoko undertake, albeit at a much more gradual pace.

But of course, when we compare Time with The Works and Days, it reveals a fairly basic, unavoidable truth. Tayoko Shiojiri's life, shadowed as it is by loss, is following cycles of human life that are as natural as the shifting of the seasons. The Richardson family, by contrast, have been thrust into "time out of joint," a sociopolitical disruption of the lives they had every right to expect to lead.