The work of artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley is rooted in the observation of American culture. With an incisive approach, Bradley’s work brings out the complexities and challenges of daily life, inviting the audience to reflect on the contemporary world both within her own country and its relationship to and within, the larger global narrative. Lo schermo dell’arte, which in 2019 presented her single channel film America, is pleased to dedicate the 2024 Focus to five additional works created between 2017 and 2022.

The focus on Garrett Bradley, in collaboration with The Recovery Plan, begins on November 14 at 3:00 p.m. with a conversation between the artist and professor Rossella Catanese at New York University Florence, Villa Sassetti. The program opens at 9:00 p.m. at Cinema La Compagnia, with Bradley present, featuring the screening of America (2019), followed by the short films Aka (2019), Safe (Excerpt) (2022) at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, and the first episode of the Netflix miniseries Naomi Osaka: Rise (2021). On November 15 at 5:00 p.m., the feature film Time will be screened. Through January 31, Alone will be shown at Palazzo Gucci.

America
USA 2019, 30′

In 2014, the MoMA in New York restored and showed an unpublished silent film from 1913: Lime Kiln Club Field Day, directed by famous Bahamian entertainer Bert Williams. The cast was entirely African-American actors, a rarity for that era. Fascinated by this cinematic rediscovery, African-American director Garrett Bradley decided to trace the history of black cinema from Lime Kiln Club Field Day to the present. According to research conducted by the Library of Congress, at least 70% of silent films made in the United States between 1912 and 1929 have disappeared. It’s likely many were made by African American directors, for an African American audience. In America Bradley tries to bridge this historical gap through archival materials and documentary strategies. In thirty minutes of black and white images, the director intertwines scenes from Bert Williams’s silent film with twelve of his own short films, inspired by African American historical figures who’ve become “invisible”. The soundtrack was composed by Trevor Mathison, a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective. The film was made for the Whitney Biennial 2019.

AKA
USA, 2019, 8’17’’

AKA, the first in a trilogy about women’s relationships, focuses on mothers and daughters in mixed-race families or those with varying skin tones. Garrett Bradley’s experimental short arose from conversations with her female protagonists, exploring race, upward mobility, and relationships between white and Black women. The term “color struck” shapes the film’s prismatic effects, contributing to its dream-like atmosphere. These dialogues influenced the film’s choreography and locations, reflecting the visions of its subjects

Safe (Excerpt)
USA, 2022, sound, 3’15’’

Safe (2022) is the second film in a trilogy exploring the overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives. Following AKA (2019), which examined intergenerational relationships, Safe delves into inner worlds, depicting them as vivid and parallel to the outside world. Featuring Donna Crump and Aloné Watts, the film captures the ineffable nature of interior emotions, treating them as a radical space of Black life This excerpt was originally screened as part of a public symposium, God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin organized by writer and critic, Hilton Als on December 9, 2023 at The Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York, USA. The excerpt combines elements of both AKA and SAFE and serves as an experiment for the last in Bradley’s trilogy.

Naomi Osaka: Rise
USA, 2021, 38’

Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, born in 1997, is the highest-paid female athlete in the world and has won four Grand Slam titles by the age of 23. The three-episode docuseries, produced by Netflix and directed by Garrett Bradley, offers an intimate look into her life, exploring the successes and tough decisions that have made her a global star and a young woman facing the pressures placed on her by the outside world. Filmed over two pivotal years, from 2019 to 2021, Bradley follows Osaka as she refines her game, explores her roots, and becomes a tennis champion. From her victory at the 2018 U.S. Open to her defeat the following year, to her involvement in protests for George Floyd and Jacob Blake, Naomi Osaka uses her growing visibility to forge a personal and unique path, breaking away from imposed norms. Bradley portrays Osaka with great sensitivity, highlighting not only her athletic triumphs but also her personal challenges, such as balancing her private life with her career and her role as an icon of social change. Far from the rhetoric of traditional sports films, the series captures the Japanese tennis player through more nuanced and complex moments, emphasizing her honesty and reflections on profound themes such as identity and gender politics.

Time
USA, 2020, 81’

In this intimate yet epic love story filmed over the course of two decades, the indomitable matriarch Fox Rich strives to raise her six children and keep her family united while fighting for the release of her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. Time, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, was Bradley’s first feature-length documentary, which the artist herself describes as a “sister film” to her 2017 short film Alone.

Alone
Stati Uniti, 2017, 13’
Gucci Visions, Palazzo GucciThe mass incarceration problem in America affects more than just the men inside. In Louisiana, 1 in 14 African-American men are incarcerated. Alone is the story of a young woman who chooses to commit herself to one of these men and how this decision radiates through her life and those of others.