Time: Time in the Mind

That’s who opens Time: Sibil Fox Richardson, before she was Fox Rich, the orator and prison abolitionist and matriarch. Before a twenty-year fight to gain clemency for her incarcerated husband, Rob, who was sentenced to prison for sixty years without the possibility of probation or parole; before the three youngest of her six sons were born; before the fight returned its reward. A young mother in profile, cheeks round, torso round with life, fussing with a camcorder in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the late nineties. The frame is everything to Fox, because the video she records is meant to substitute memory for Rob, if not become memory. Fox, and as he grew older, Remington, her eldest son, recorded the mundane and the monumental—the amusement-park rides; the birth of the twins, Justus and Freedom, named after the elusive ideals; the car rides; the offhand reprimands—to replace the human experience Rob could not have. The moving image as surrogate life, then. The very texture of Fox’s digital footage seems alive because it is deteriorating, like bodies do, showing the effects of age. It’s not difficult to understand why Bradley, when assembling this opening montage, a kind of shadow film, was attracted to the archive, its totemic meaning, for it contains not just the vital stuff of family maintenance but the awareness of history being made. Notice the instances of talk Bradley makes sure to include in her selections. Fox talking to Rob, showing the smile she will give him when he comes home. Remington, in the car, discovering the bounds of his identity through the technology of the lens. “So, Pops, this is me. This is myself. Back to you,” says the child. Black elders love to hyperbolize that they blink and a child is full-grown; Bradley’s edit of Remington’s life, from grade-schooler to graduate of dental school, punctuated by a coda shot of the man ascending in a transparent elevator, is a miniature film in and of itself, implicitly told, I think, from the imagined perspective of Rob, whom for most of the film we see only in a snapshot of a kiss between the lovers, and hear only on the other end of inhumanely truncated prison phone calls.

This is not to say that Bradley—her gaze, her presence—is wholly deferential to the perspective of the family, or self-annihilating. She is no annotator. Bradley has her own agenda, political and aesthetic. There is the imposition of her signature palette, the color-sapping gray scale, on the sequences, both archival and contemporaneously composed. There is the piano score, taken from the oeuvre of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, which gives the portrait a diaspora-minded sound, epic in its scope of late-century styles. There is the repeated canted angle of Fox, this time primarily reserved for her delivery of an abolitionist address at Tulane University. And, of course, there are the indirect associative connections made by Bradley and Gabriel Rhodes, the editor of the film, in their merging of the material. Bradley lives in the cut. Time is very much the director’s vision of the Richardson family odyssey, a slant that is fascinating, and slightly dissonant with the material, if you look closely. The subjects are keen self-stylers and practiced lay documentarians. The most indelible scene in a film dense with indelible scenes is our first contemporary view of Fox. Now the owner of a successful car dealership in New Orleans, she is in her office being filmed for a commercial. Her voice is deeper, her enunciation clearer by orders of magnitude than what we have seen in the home footage. She is a commanding presence. She directs the director of the commercial with a certitude of purpose that is disproportionate to the project. “No,” Bradley’s zoom seems to nearly vocalize, “Fox Rich, who has had life taken away from her and her family, completes all activities with conviction.” Bradley’s camera pushes in on grooming scenes throughout—hair being pin-curled, lashes being lacquered, slacks being pressed, beards being stroked—and these slight montages wordlessly convey the Black Christian correlation: physical hygiene as moral hygiene. Status, how one looks to society, is important to the Richardson family.

It was not until my third viewing of Time that I noticed how infrequently Bradley films the family together, so powerful is the love and loyalty that otherwise courses between them. Even when they are in the same building—say, at Remington’s graduation—the director separates the members, so the unit stays visually elusive. The splintering evokes for the viewer the radiating traumas of incarceration, its creation of attendant loneliness: every experience of the nearly two and a half million people who are in prison in the U.S., and their families, is different. Time passes at undecipherable rates. Progress is inertia. Time whizzes by; it freezes. For Fox, the system is a predatory bureaucratic hell. She is often observed alone in her office, on the phone, pressing an administrator for an update on a judge’s parole decision. The phone calls are rendered in suspenseful real time; we as viewers share, for merely a matter of minutes, an infinitesimal sample of what life has been for Fox for years. For Freedom, a political science student, the absence of his father stoked in him a desire to continue the work of his abolitionist mother. And for Fox’s mother, Ms. Peggy—the most stirring camera presence in the film besides her daughter—the system is something to be avoided. “Right don’t come to you doing wrong,” says Ms. Peggy. Ms. Peggy, and her bitter remembrance of time lost, or wasted, brings an ambivalence, so clearly softened by the years, that recalls that of Aloné’s mother figures. The forgiveness weighted by the not-forgetting—this is a history brought to the fore too.

Time won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, making Bradley the first Black woman to win the prize, and afterward, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Bradley may have made the most discussed documentary of 2020. The film is often talked about in terms of omission. It does not resemble any other prison documentary. It does not contain identifying time stamps. It does not deploy experts. It does not polemicize. Presidencies passed, and storms raged, and wars were launched and lost, and no part of the torrent explicitly comes into frame. All that talk of subtraction, however, obscures the creative powers of the artist, who has, ultimately, made for the Richardson family a love story for their spiritual consumption. It is almost a miracle, the way the film ends. The momentum, the drive to the final act, puts us in mind of fiction. Rob is released into the arms of Fox. We are stupefied by the simple fact of his physicality, and we the viewers have gone without seeing him in the flesh for only seventy or so minutes. What of a lifetime? The two pile into a car, and the camera lingers on the activity of connection, the most human work; Rob lying down, Fox’s shoulders heaving. All of a sudden this film, built on abstraction and impression and absence, sees love made incarnate. From this point, Bradley’s final montage, a rewinding of her film, which is to say, the undoing of her film, is counterintuitively a picture of life reinstated.

Sixty years. Sixty years. Sixty years. Sixty years. It is as if, at the Tulane talk, Fox is attempting to will the absurd length of her husband’s sentence into corporeal shape. No container can hold the raw mass of sixty years, Bradley knows, but that of a life, and every day gained is paradoxically one lost. What is created is destroyed. To describe one of Bradley’s final, ritualistic images: the effigy is burned to ash, and the man lives in its stead.