NEW MOMA EXHIBITION INTERROGATES CANON OF DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING
New York City-born filmmaker Garrett Bradley wants to highlight the vast array of Black figures in film who have been forgotten with time in her new exhibition, “Projects: Garrett Bradley,” which is on view now at the MoMA.
The exhibition is ongoing until mid-March and revolves around one of Bradley’s recent works: “America,” a short film that offers an alternative history of Black Americans on the silver screen during the early 20th-century. In regards to the motivation behind her work, Bradley has said that each of her films flows into and informs the others she has directed, and that poignant stories come to her because of her own connection to the Black community.
“I think I’m obsessed with and personally invested in how communities, individuals and institutional structures appear to not be in dialogue with – and often contradict – one another,” Bradley expressed to Terence Trouillot, a writer and editor from New York City, late last year. “I think my work occupies that intersectional grey area between seemingly oppositional arenas.”
“Projects” is Bradley’s first solo show in New York; It displays “America” on 12 black-and-white multichannel screens and is set to a score by composer Udit Duseja and artist Trevor Mathison. The exhibition is presented as part of a multiyear partnership between The Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, an artistic institution devoted to highlighting works from Black artists.
Juxtaposing archival footage with Bradley’s original, contemporary images of Black strife, joy and survival, “America” serves as an example for how film can capture moments in time unlike any other medium. Furthermore, the exhibition aims to highlight how film can probe societal injustices, investigate how Blackness has been largely discarded in favor of a dominant, white canon, and how film can potentially spur sociocultural change.
Bradley’s most recent work, for which she won a directing award at Sundance, is an evocative feature documentary called “Time.” Released in January of last year, the film follows Sibil Fox Richardson, a mother of six, wife and abolitionist, as she fights to free her husband, Rob, from a 61-year prison sentence in Angola. In “Time,” Bradley intertwines old family footage provided by Richardson with original testimonials to paint a portrait of a family navigating the quasi-Kafkaesque carceral state. Rather than portraying innocence met with cruel injustice, Bradley opted to make “Time” a character study, investigating how familial relations, love and faith mutate under the weight of incarceration. In response to being lauded as a filmmaker who defies the confines of genre, Bradley explained to Trouillot in the midst of their dialogue that “regardless of the project, my process doesn’t change.
“This question of genre is something I leave to the technocrats – I don’t really make those distinctions myself – although I am invested in the truth and the different ways truth is navigated in the context of documentary filmmaking,” Bradley continued. “The history of documentary filmmaking is rooted in this false idea of objectivity when, in reality, even the very first documentary, “Nanook of the North” (1922), was a fictional re-creation. There’s also this notion in documentary filmmaking that the truth is vulnerable and aligned with victimhood to a certain extent, which is something that doesn’t interest me.”
Although artistic equity across racial groups has been growing over the past few years, Black artists continue to navigate a landscape that is imbued in white supremacy and elitism. A 2018 collaborative investigation between artnet News and In Other Words into racial equity in museum acquisitions found that “since 2008, just 2.37% of all acquisitions and gifts and 7.6% of all exhibitions at 30 prominent American museums have been of work by African American artists.” Curatorial, conservation and leadership positions see a mirrored rate of racial disparity; a 2019 joint study by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museum and Ithaka S+R found that only 16% of curatorial positions, 11% of conservation jobs and 12% of museum leadership roles were held by people of color in 2018. By comparison, the same study noted that 84% of curatorial positions, 89% of conservation jobs and 88% of museum leadership roles were held by white people.
In a country that initially sustained itself economically by using Black slave labor and retains economic dominance during this epoch of plutocratic, post-industrial modernity with the egregiously lucrative and racially skewed prison industrial complex, unestablished Black artists are entering a field that is innately opposed to embracing their racial identity while they grapple with ongoing systemic racism in countless facets of life. While Black Americans make up 13% of the country’s population and 12% of the workforce, they are severely underrepresented in a plethora of industries. In late-2019, Harvard Business Review reported that only 1.9% of tech executives and 5.3% of tech professionals are Black. Additionally, HBR found the average partnership rate for Black lawyers at U.S. firms from 2005 to 2016 was 1.8%. Furthermore, 7% of U.S. higher education administrators and 8% of nonprofit leaders are Black, HBR found. Lastly, HBR reported that merely 10% of U.S. businesses are Black-owned. Black households have roughly 10 cents in wealth for every dollar a white household has, according to a 2018 study by Pew Research Center, which is particularly damning given the continued criminalization of poverty and the virulent nature of prolonged wage stagnation under neoliberal austerity.
Despite the lucid presence of what at times seem to be insurmountable obstructions to racial equity and equality in this country, the much-needed, almost cathartic protests this past summer forced a litany of institutions across the globe to reckon with their role as enforcers, either tacit or explicit, of both white supremacy and structural inequality within their own infrastructures. This reckoning did not exclude the art world: Museums are beginning to show semblances of accountability, and many have implemented institutional changes in an effort to promote diversity and work towards racial equity. The number of people of color in leadership, curatorial or other major roles in museum spaces has been growing more rapidly in recent years, and museums and galleries in a range of locales are giving shows and accolades to Black artists at an increasing rate.
The most direct way to increase racial equity in the context of filmmaking is to “democratize technology,” H.L.T. Quan, an associate professor of justice studies at Arizona State University and cofounder of QUAD Productions, said. “As an independent filmmaker, I know that it’s cheaper now to be able to make an aesthetically acceptable product.”
Despite increased access for marginalized filmmakers to create work, Quan explained that studio titans like Netflix and Amazon have retained and expanded much of their influence over the past decade, making it difficult for Black artists to finance and distribute their work authentically and without ideological interference from these aforementioned distribution companies.
On the other hand, the number of alternative outlets has been proliferating, Quan said. “If you’re talking about the major studios ... the challenge is still the same. I think Spike Lee was at ASU a couple of years ago … and he still talked about how difficult it is for him to greenlight a project, to get a project greenlighted I should say.” Major studios may be apprehensive to take on subject matter that challenges or subverts established dogma or institutionalized notions relating to race, religion, sex, gender or sexuality.
“Certain projects still don’t get made, or if they get made there’s not enough of them that get made,” Quan said in an impassioned tone. “There’s no question. If you compare to when I first started teaching Black cinema, it was in the mid-’90s, there were (much) fewer films and fewer outlets. But, at the same time, the structure, the hierarchy is very much still in place. But, has there been progress? You bet there has been.
“I think, you know, for every Shonda Rhimes, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other Black filmmakers that don’t even get an audience.”