“With Peter Bradley” is an intimate portrait of 82-year old Black abstract painter Peter Bradley, who as a young artist, art dealer and curator rose to remarkable heights in the 1960s and ‘70s, before slipping gradually into obscurity beginning the 1980’s. Screening at the Florida Film Festival, this documentary is a fascinating and well made look at an artist’s process as well as his past accomplishments and current place in art history, and in this interview I ask cinematographer turned first time feature length filmmaker Alex Rappoport about his process in putting this all together, the film’s incredible jazz score, and his future ambitions.

Chris Crespo: Your production notes state you had over 20 hours of footage when you decided to start editing, so how did you manage to cut that down to a 90-minute feature? How did the overall story and feel of the documentary reveal itself to you as you assembled the film?

Alex Rappoport: I had 20 hours recorded when the Covid shutdown started in March 2020. So I did technically start editing at that point, but it was mostly organizational and a way to keep myself sane during those awful and scary weeks. We started filming again the first week of May I think, and then I shot frequently with Peter until the end of June before really sitting down to edit in earnest. At that point I had maybe 50 hours of material. And then I picked up interviews and little bits of Peter painting in the Fall, after I had a sense of what gaps needed to be filled narratively/biographically.Continue Reading …