Abstract: This essay approaches deceleration as a thickening of historical and phenomenological time through the audiovisual moving image. I read Garrett Bradley's poetic documentary about mass incarceration, Time (2020), alongside works by the pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, whose expansive, genre-defying compositions score the film. Emahoy's music bears the inscriptions of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia and its carceral archipelagoes, and refuses to be contained by them. Beginning on the former prison island of Asinara (Sardinia), where Emahoy, her family, and members of her community were forcibly relocated by Italian occupiers when she was a child, the essay traces the anticarceral conjunctures delicately woven into and radiating out from Bradley's film. Thick time emerges across this essay as a means of resisting carceral temporalities and sensing their longue durée . Through Bradley's Time , I theorize the time-image as it collides with a carcerality that wields time as a whip, or duration as punishment—one that is not limited to the run time of the film, but instead reverberates for centuries.
Rhiannon Noel Welch (2025) studied this question.