Garrett Bradley

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Can you tell me about growing up in New York? What was it like transitioning from making movies as a teenager to majoring in Religion at Smith College?

GB

I grew up downtown in a firehouse in Chinatown, what’s now DCTV. Then Battery Park City and once 9/11 happened we moved quite a bit, below 14th street. My freshman year of high school, I went to Columbia Prep which is on the Upper West Side. That was challenging. I left after a year to finish school at Brooklyn Friends, which is a Quaker school. We’d sit in silence for thirty minutes a day. In my senior year, I met the filmmaker and Just Above Midtown gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Ironically, she lived a few blocks from Columbia Prep, so I found myself back uptown, interning for her and Laura Poitras on their film, Flag Wars. That internship was my first professional experience in filmmaking. At the time, Linda was also working with the great composer and cornetist, Butch Morris.

In college, I ended up majoring in Religion in large part due to my grandmother, Alice. She was fascinated by and loved to tell me stories behind paintings that dealt with religion, spirituality, and faith at the Metropolitan Museum when they would come to town. It was also a choice informed by my high school professor, Mark Buenzel, who taught art history at Brooklyn Friends. Both Alice and Mark, in different ways, introduced me to the power of narrative and the profound, long-standing history of both visual storytelling and adaptation. When I got to Smith, I realized I was compelled by the stories and so left the Art History department which is where I had started and received my degree in a comparative study between Hindu and Judaic Philosophy.

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How did you make sense of your interest in religion at the time?

GB

It was an impulse. By then, I understood filmmaking as an alchemy in which different, sometimes oppositional, elements come together to make something new. Like any paradox, filmmaking got me closer to what felt real and true. Religious storytelling in art and ritual felt like an extension of the possibility I found in filmmaking; these practices, in their contradictions and various modes of expression, were somehow touching an essential truth of what it means to be alive. For instance, in Hindu philosophy, Darshan is the act of seeing something holy; seeing is a kind of prayer. In Judaic philosophy, to make an image of God is sacrilegious. In both philosophies, the presence of sight holds this great power. That polarity and the premium placed on sight pushed me in a direction that I didn’t question. Really, my roots are in image-making, in a context not only of faith but of organizing and understanding the world. Images are belief systems; they reflect and create worlds. I take that responsibility very seriously.

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You were thinking in multiple contexts about image-making.

GB

Yes, and language. As a kid, I looked at figurative paintings in academic contexts and learned about the text from which they were born. That led me to the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, which I experienced as epic visual landscapes. As movies.

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In your book Devotion (Re:), you speak with your mother about the Old Testament as a primary text and the relationship between Robert Altman’s film Nashville and Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Tower of Babel. Your mother reflects back to you how those stories captivated you as a young person, and you mentioned the ziggurat–the architecture of the Tower of Babel. When I think about your relationship to space, architecture, or process, I think about your multichannel video installation, America, at the MoMA in 2019. Part of the context for that work is the haptic experience you had of working through a physical archive interested in physicalizing a complexity of story, image, and chronology.

GB

Because of the archive's tactility and the connections I was making from a historical standpoint, I didn’t want to work through America as an exclusively two-dimensional experience. I wanted it to be something that could be moved through. Where the viewer could make their own visual connections that were completely dependent on their curiosity, movement, height, proximity, and perspective. In offering that kind of encounter, a metaphor for how history gets perceived could really come alive. The subject matter of that work dictated its form. I should also say, I think about the difference between the terms “subject matter” and “content.” I’m not using the word content because it has come to imply a kind of corporate ethos. Content is the result of subject matter, first and foremost, being made to fit into a certain predetermined rigidity. You can feel when there is a dialogue between subject matter and form. I’m most interested in making form work harder and in service of subject matter.

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Did your show at MoMA change your practice?

GB

It definitely expanded it. I’ve been working on this series of films, the first called AKA (2019), which is a single-channel piece focused on the relationships between mothers and daughters. Its extension, or second part Safe, (2022), is more about one’s relationship with oneself via sound. I’ve been thinking about how intuition and innate “knowing” work differently from one another but alchemize to inform our behavior. Between the two works, there is a shift from external to internal relationships and I built the sound for both films with the intention of them coexisting in one space. Part of what makes a single channel experience so remarkable is its ability (when it is able) to harmonize multiple elements and perspectives. But being able to physically break those pieces out while maintaining that harmony is something I want to keep thinking through, and definitely came out of that particular project (America). I didn’t always feel this, but as I’ve continued to work with moving images, the medium increasingly frustrates me; it creates unprecedented challenges that I don’t find inherently interesting. I’ve started going back to my roots in traditional photography and finding ways to work with my hands more.

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What are those challenges?

GB

I think the excessiveness with which we engage screens has presented real challenges for artists working with images. I wonder if the internet, while providing unprecedented access, also contributes to a vast oversimplification of a mirrored world. Timothy Synder uses this metaphor of an ocean where waves of information keep crashing, and one can never see the horizon. Turning a physical page at least protects us from that need for a constant grab. I’m not worried about being special, separate, or “higher than” the internet, but I am worried about what happens when human creation is predominantly mitigated by a digital element. I think it blocks us, to a certain extent, from the ability to learn beyond (beyond our own algorithms) and to feel as we are meant to. Humans are meant to feel; everything we act on comes from feeling. Movies have always depended on screens, but it’s never been this isolated. Movie-making and, for the most part, movie-viewing have always relied on group engagement and collaboration. When there is no shared space and environment, when we are looking and being with things in such a way that is tailored to accommodate our immediate impulses, it changes the work, it changes our connection to it and I think in someway it also asks us to redefine what it means to make work that is “time based.” What time is the work based on?

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Why did you choose to go to film school? What was it like moving to Los Angeles to get your MFA in directing at UCLA?

GB

In my last year of college, while I was finishing my degree in Religion, I continued to make films on my own and wanted at that point, to get formal training. I wanted to work with a group of people also interested in film and get my hands on equipment. Film school was the best way for me to do that. I didn’t want to crew on Hollywood films and wait or rely on a mostly male, mostly white industry to give me an opportunity to move up. It didn’t seem realistic. When I’m in love, I’m impatient. Film school was a way for me to learn without depending on someone to open a gate. And that isn’t to say what I did was the best choice either but it seemed a direct way to at least get a sense of a tradition and how things may typically get done alongside a group of people who became true creative allies to this day. While at UCLA, I met Billy Woodberry, who was teaching at CalArts. I don’t remember what we were watching; mostly, it was a lot of cigarette smoking and talking, me trying to keep up with him. I ended up visiting CalArts a few times to sit in on his classes. He exposed me to the neorealist movement, which the UCLA community had been part of in the 1960s. There was also Becky Smith, Nancy Richardson, and Rory Kelly, who were (are) deeply generous teachers and, I think, made their students better people, let alone artists or filmmakers. 

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It wasn’t until recently that I learned that Charles Burnett was the cinematographer of Woodberry’s film Bless Their Little Hearts. The lead actress is also in Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. How do you think about the LA Rebellion in terms of UCLA, collaboration, and community?

GB

Those filmmakers were exercising more freedoms than protest; what they were doing was a Black American extension and interpretation of the Italian New Wave, which is also called post-war cinema. Since America has always been a battleground, maybe it was inevitable that a group of filmmakers would find a way to adopt similar practices, which was to work with available resources, people, and environments that weren’t constructed or dependent on anyone's approval. The work that came out of that time period reflects a mastery of the form and should, in my opinion, be given a new name because it was not just rebellion; it was invention, innovation, and vast artistic progress for the form in a short period.

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I saw Killer of Sheep for the first time in one of Kevin Quashie’s classes at Smith College, and it was one of those formative experiences for me in thinking about narrative across form. What films were you thinking about while you were at UCLA? What was shaping your relationship to abstraction and narrative?

GB

Neorealism offered depictions of life that were more recognizable and familiar; it really looked like people driving in a car or somebody crossing an actual street. By default, the performances that were elicited and the acting that was seen could all shift in a new direction. That kind of filmmaking has a different impact on how you start to see the world. As a young person interested in filmmaking, there was something really important and resonant about that process. William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One was revelatory for me because it critiqued filmmaking and dealt with power, gender, race, fabrication, and reality all at once. It was also very validating. The writing about that film has changed in recent years, but there was this debate around how the film was somehow about losing control of your crew. Of course, that’s far from the soul of the film. It’s intentionally constructed; it’s not about mutiny. You don’t have Miles Davis score a film when you don’t know what the fuck is going on. [Laughs.] The whole thing is a critique.

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I want to go back to what you said about the context of beauty because I first encountered your work in a series programmed by Ashley Clark at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. You, Ashley, and Julie Dash were in conversation, and you spoke about beauty and the question of its power in the context of documentary filmmaking.

GB

Yes. Alex Bell and I spoke about this in the book because, as an interdisciplinary artist, Alex grapples with many of the same questions in her work in terms of arrangement and language. The beautiful and the ugly can, I think, get us to the same place of self awareness, of encouraging positive change in ourselves and the world . I’ve just always gravitated toward the respite and the work being able to provide that (first and foremost) for those who need it. That the work can heal before it takes on the burden of teaching.

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A lot of these stories come out of intimate relationships in your personal life, and there’s a conversation to be had there about time, but there’s also your interest and love for the mundane; for instance, in Time, we see Fox Rich in a prolonged phone call facing the excruciating bureaucracy of the prison system. How do you think about time and intimacy filmically?

GB

The circumstances always dictate the process. That doesn’t mean my ethics shift, but that the intention, the why, is often unique from one project to the next. Because the why informs the how, there’s never a paint-by-numbers approach for how to evoke intimacy. Like any relationship. Some filmmakers approach their work from a distinctly objective point of view, meaning they don’t (and may even find it problematic) to bond so deeply. That’s when one might use terms like “the subject.” I’m not interested in a person being a subject. I’m interested in how the intimacies of our lives, our most personal (not private but personal) experiences, can support the larger possibility of communicable self-awareness. The work can provide a space for us to see ourselves and the strangers next to us as being one and the same, even–and perhaps especially so, through our differences. The beauty of making things and sharing them, however you can, is best served when you allow your work to be in conversation with the rest of the world.

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What about the Naomi Osaka Netflix documentary you directed? 

GB

Working with Naomi was the first time I worked closely with someone I had no prior relationship with. Most of my projects develop out of intimate collaboration with those in my immediate community. It was also the first time I would work in a predetermined format, with an archive and a structure and episodic format. It required me to consider how a life or a time period could be meaningfully and ethically communicated organized in a genuine way.

It’s been my feeling that a lot of documentaries today, around celebrities, turn into recaps of things that are absorbed and known in the press, cut alongside sound bites from the person's point of view, around their side of the story. In order for me to take this project on, I had to find a way to get outside the circularity of the press and explore what life really felt like for Naomi. I was interested in showing the world what motivated her. It was important, for me, to understand the nuances and complexities of tennis and the kind of person the sport attracts. What it uniquely demands. I wanted to make the docuseries more accessible to a larger audience. I thought it would also make it worthwhile for her, as someone who would give so much of their own time and energy while having a film made about them, still relatively early on in their career.

The real challenge was showing the audience how reserved Naomi is. While she’s a deeply internal person, it was about creating the conditions to show how she approached playing tennis which is a uniquely mental sport. Once you’re on the court, you can’t ask for help. There’s no one there to aid, advocate, or encourage you. In many cases, the mental agility of a tennis player is equally essential, if not more important, than physical conditioning.

I positioned our cameras opposite of the press so we could be with her rather than consume her. We wanted to display the full context of a room and make clear connections between the emotional weight put on any athlete and their environment.

The questions Naomi brought to the table during that time also became the foundation on which we built the series: How does one find balance in life? How does purpose, in and of itself, change over time as one continues to meet milestones? As those questions started to dictate filming, they also expanded to the universal inquiry of life’s purpose, of personal worth, and about the courage and faith that is required to achieve peace.

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You also gave Osaka her own camera. What was your thinking?

GB

I did. Instinctually, I felt she could benefit from having an outlet that was just for her, on her own terms, whether we used the material or not. On a practical level, it was a way for us to capture things in situations where we were restricted and physically could not shoot ourselves.

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In an interview with the art historian Huey Copeland, you mention your interest in bridging internal and external worlds. What does that bridge mean for you within the framework of narrative abstraction?

GB

That’s such a good question. My first mind wants to say that there’s some correlation between thought and physicality and narrative and abstraction. I think a lot about transitionary periods and their role in understanding the relationship between the concrete and the abstract; I’m thinking about how ideas can turn into objects and how biology creates the soul. In order to connect with one another, we have to create some external conditions to produce new results. Are our feelings narrative or abstract? Do we need a narrative to get to the abstract, or vice versa? If one is interested in having an effect (which not everyone is), these are some of the central questions that come to the surface when you start making work.

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In an interview with IndieWire, you spoke about chronology and the process of editing Time. You said, “Well, love is abstract.” I kept thinking about that.

GB

Yes, I have to have an intention behind my work. Love can be that intention, but how the audience makes their way to that love is its own journey. It’s always a question of allowing viewers to arrive at the intention on their terms, and I believe I’ve done my job if, no matter who they are, they eventually get there.

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Can you speak about sound and score in your own films? You mentioned Miles Davis’ score of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm earlier. For Time’s soundtrack, you looked to Éthiopiques Vol. 21, an album by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun and pianist whose music you encountered on YouTube. While you’re thinking about images as belief systems, how are you thinking about sound?

GB

More and more, I think about sound in relation to safety. Safe (2022) is essentially about how our lives are shaped by the sounds of our environments: sirens, helicopters, dings. These sounds shape the way we feel and how we behave.

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Yes, understandably. I went to Wimbledon a few days ago and was shocked by the sonic intensity, the tension, and the silence; you could hear a pin drop.

GB

It’s intense, very formal. The negotiation process that happens between the players and the referee is incredibly loaded. As I mentioned earlier, the athlete really has to advocate for themselves on the world’s stage in real time. It requires a lot of self-control and decorum. When you watch other sports like basketball or football, the coaches can lose their shit on behalf of, and with no implication to the players. They serve as advocates and guardians. It’s not about composure, but with tennis, it is charged.

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Two years into your time at UCLA, you moved to New Orleans to make your thesis film, Below Dreams. What informed your decision to move to Louisiana and to stay?

GB

As someone from New York, I’m an outsider. I think there is some kind of unspoken rule or agreement that if you move here to New Orleans, the work you do must be in relationship to the place itself. Either the work contributes to New Orleans meaningfully or is about it. [Laughs.] I know that sounds kind of crazy. That’s not the case everywhere. Los Angeles is the total opposite and can thrive as a stand-in for another place. In film school, they would tell us that if we want L.A. to look like New York, you’ve got to find steam coming from a manhole. [Laughs.] It’s that kind of thinking.

Around 2009, I started taking Greyhound buses from New York to New Orleans on my summer breaks from grad school. It was about 32 hours one way. And it occurred to me that the people I had met and the stories I had heard started to collate into some kind of thesis for me. At that point, my generation was not equally represented in mainstream culture. I became interested in what it would mean to make something that showed how a reverse migration from north to south could be depicted. I wanted to give light to how the eventual navigation of New Orleans itself could reflect multiple and simultaneous realities, all of which made up a single generation. That’s what Below Dreams, my first longer-form film, was about. I stayed because, in that process, I’d found a community and felt somehow that the city had accepted me and was willing to let me stay.

And now, 14 years later, I’m still here and thinking about that a lot recently. Outside of my relationships, I am asking myself what keeps me here. I do miss New York. I used to think the reason I hadn’t left was because my work was so invested in teasing out the past and that, in doing so, I could offer something meaningful to the present and to the future. But more and more, as the country continues to shift toward authoritarianism, toward a right-wing, evangelical agenda, I realize the South is, and always has been, the future. The South has always shown the country what it really is and where it’s really going before anyone else. And I think we can thank the South for that because despite how we might feel, this isn’t our first rodeo, and I have no doubt that as quickly as the problems continue to arise, so will the solutions.