Over troubled waters
Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life meditative plunges the S.F. International Film Festival into a heated bridge debate.

By Susan Gerhard

Bridge turner: Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life might become a touchstone in the debate about whether the Golden Gate Bridge needs a suicide barrier.
Guardian photo by Mirissa Neff

It might be hard to imagine that, still waiting 16 years for the rebuilding of a bridge that crumbled during the Loma Prieta earthquake, San Franciscans would have the energy to turn the Bay Bridge's model sibling – the tranquil, elegant Golden Gate – into the focus of an even more heated discussion. But at the March 11 meeting of the Golden Gate Bridge's directors, the topic was sensational – suicide – because the landmark in question has become the destination for more than 1,300 jumpers to date. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, surviving family members testified about the agonizing loss of their loved ones to impulsive jumps from the bridge. One grieving mother even offered up the idea of closing the pedestrian walkway altogether; a proposal to tax pedestrians and bicyclists crossing the bridge was also raised. Representatives of the – up to now – majority viewpoint that a suicide barrier would be too costly, too ugly, or just too Big Brotherly, weren't organized and present in any large numbers for that meeting, but they later vented their opinions on blogs, talk radio, and editorial pages. Temporarily tamped down by the unexpected windfall of $1.6 million in federal funds for a study of suicide-barrier possibilities, the debate will surely rise again when that study reaches completion.

A professional at digging through archives for their most poignant, sometimes malevolent treasures, filmmaker Jenni Olson might, at first glance, appear to be the person least likely to want to agitate for change to a historic structure like the Golden Gate Bridge. Her body of film work to date has ranged from graceful experiments in tone and landscape (Blue Diary, 1997; Meep Meep!, 2000) to appreciations of lost Hollywood histories contained in all variety of trailers (among them Homo Promo, 1991; Jodie Promo, 1995; Trailer Camp, 1995; Trailers Schmailers, 1997; Afro Promo, 1997). Her recent Lambda Literary Award-finalist book, The Queer Movie Poster Book, unpacks the coding in 40 years of salacious movie marketing for the queer coffee table; she also has an expensive habit of collecting some of the kinds of movies Vito Russo might have liked to see burn 30 years ago. Her most recent acquisition is the 1973 dykesploiter Just the Two of Us, whose tagline reads, "The tragedy of today's lonely housewife." A through-line in all her work – both in and outside film – has been a fascination with and preservation of history, even at its most egregious.

Olson's signed on to a long list of campaigns to save civic structures, from the New Mission Theater to the Roxie Cinema, from the 17 Reasons sign to Parkside Elementary. I've known her for 15 years, so a few weeks ago, when I ran into her in St. Mary's Park, where she's now lived for a number of months, I wasn't quite shocked that she'd already gotten the lowdown on the history of the housing development and its Catholic roots. Which is why I was so curious watching The Joy of Life – the film Olson premiered at Sundance in January and which receives its Bay Area debut at the San Francisco International Film Festival this week. For me, it featured a surprise ending: Olson comes to the conclusion that the Golden Gate Bridge needs to be corrected.

Cross that bridge?

You can't visit the basement office of Olson's Spanish Mediterranean revival home without feeling her acute interaction with the past. (Why "revival," for instance? Olson has an answer.) Underneath the Kendall Motor Oil clock from the gas station she worked at in her hometown of Falcon Heights, Minn., and not too distant from the morbid London Standard kiosk sign ("Rock Hudson 'Home to Die' ") that truly brings back the bad old days, she's talking to me about the origins of her hypnotic, original feature debut.

In The Joy of Life it becomes immediately clear that landscapes, like people, are vulnerable. As long, meditative shots of San Francisco fill the screen, a voice-over supplies the voluptuously remembered trysts and crushes and lusts of a butch seeking love (told in the sexily pebbled voice of Harriet Dodge). Each frame is a portrait of some city block or building or view, often from a forgotten angle or exotic distance that leaves the major landmark obscured while some minor movements (tiny birds taking flight, a tree blowing in the wind, red lights blinking at an intersection) take the lead. As it would on a long bus ride through all-too-pretty terrain, the mind wanders with the story, then is whipped back to attention by the brilliant but infinitesimal, something exquisitely susceptible – like one small live wire, dangling dangerously from telephone polls that rise like crucifixes above a city block. A melancholy, transient and beautiful, occupies every inch of the audiovisual space the way San Francisco's fog forecloses on day.

It's appropriate, then, that the voice of San Francisco poet-icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti closes the first half of the film's stories with the poem "The Changing Light," which leaves the city drifting, "anchorless upon the ocean," because the film is not so much about the stasis of cities or landscapes as about their glacial movements. The film's title itself comes from an ancient advertisement for Omar Cigarettes (on view on-screen) that Olson saw painted on, and mostly peeled off of, a hotel at Mason and Ellis.

"I just love that so much of the film, visually, is about stopping, looking, and paying attention – having some feelings about what you're seeing," says Olson, who estimates that 30 percent of what was filmed has already changed since being put on celluloid – the Anna's Danish Cookies sign on 18th Street, for one. "I love that the current face of the city reveals its history."

If it begins, as so many movies do, with girls, it ends, as so many movies don't, with bridges. The first part was always meant to be a fictionalized diary, Olson tells me, and was conceived more than 10 years ago, but the second part could have been about railroad rights-of-way (a fascinating one leads from Jury Commons Park on Guerrero Street right through the corner of 24th Street and Mission) or telephone exchange names ("I'm on a listserv of all these old phone company employees, and they're amazing! I swear, they must read phone books in their spare time; they will tell you the exchange name of any city in the United States").

It became bridges, though, because Olson realized that a subject she'd been passionately avoiding was a subject that would be extremely important to face. "I was out shooting one day with cinematographer Sophie [Constantinou], and we were down by Crissy Field. We weren't shooting the bridge; we were shooting something else. And I was like, OK, the bridge is right there; let's get a shot of it. And we did. And I got really upset. I went home and was just like, OK, I can't do that again. But then I thought about it, and realized it's a really interesting history, the history of the bridge, and so I started looking into it a little bit."

The Golden Gate Bridge is the site where Olson's great friend and coworker, Mark Finch, then artistic director of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and truly admired by those who knew him in S.F. and around the world, jumped to his death Jan. 14, 1995.

Meet John Doe

"What is it that we need in an ending?" Olson writes in her screenplay for The Joy of Life. "Tied up plot lines, evidence of some meaning behind the story, a moral, a punch line, a suicide?"

Olson's film mourns the way a film by Hirokazu Kore-eda does – with distant shots that won't let you come right up and touch the trauma but that make the aftermath all the more real by being opaque. Its essayistic narrative feels Su Friedrich serious, and its visuals James Benning concentrated. But Olson's film finally pivots on the kind of archival fascinations that motivated Thom Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Like Andersen, Olson is a collector of the documentary evidence left to us by fiction. Her poignant line about endings comes during a discussion of the production history of the Frank Capra film Meet John Doe. In that movie, Barbara Stanwyck plays a journalist who manages to hold on to her column by inventing a character who threatens to commit suicide because the world has become too corrupt. When readers fall in love with the idea of saving that character, she has to actually go out and find a person (Gary Cooper) to be "John Doe." Based on a short story by Richard Connell titled "A Reputation," the original treatment, Olson writes, had John Doe actually committing that suicide. Capra was particularly intrigued by the idea and returned to it most famously in It's a Wonderful Life, in which a bridge suicide is George Bailey's original plan.

As Olson finds herself in another populist melodrama over the fate of the bridge itself, the choice of Capra as a touchstone is telling. If the narrative feels distanced and postmodern, its style as far from didactic documentary filmmaking as it could be, its hope is still, truly, that concerned citizens will carry the day.

The issue is certainly gaining momentum since the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California began reopening the old wound in July 2004. Olson published an op-ed calling for a barrier in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 14, the 10-year anniversary of Finch's death. On Jan. 19, the Chronicle broke the story that Eric Steel had been filming suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge, live, for the past year and that he was, indeed, not making a movie about the "powerful and spectacular interaction between the monument and nature" as bridge officials say he told them. A short two months later, and oddly on cue, federal funds for a study rained down.

Stranger things have happened. While the film was en route to Sundance this year, an eager employee of one music label called and wanted to represent the multitalented Weldon Kees, a poet-pianist-critic-etc. whose jaunty rag opens and closes the film. Olson had to inform her that Kees had jumped from the bridge, legendarily, 50 years ago. One who didn't jump, however, as reported in Tad Friend's 2003 New Yorker article on the bridge, was the leader of a 1977 rally for a suicide barrier, the Reverend Jim Jones.

What Olson's film may actually be preserving is the fact that the debate about how to manage the potential for suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge is as old as the bridge itself. The bridge's chief engineer, Joseph Strauss, claimed, one year before the bridge opened, that it was "practically suicide-proof," Olson writes. He'd designed the guardrail at a height of five feet, six inches so pedestrians could not climb over. But then again, pedestrians could not see over the rail either: it was architect Irving Morrow who brought the bridge its art deco flair and shifted the guardrail to a more view-enhancing four feet, leaving it vulnerable. Efforts at a fix have inevitably failed – and The Joy of Life scans the remnants of previous barrier attempts, which, unfortunately, look like they're meant for prison yards or livestock pens, not this vast, endless horizon. It's one more paradox that adds to the beauty of the film's meditation on life, death, and landmarks: one person's happy ending might just be another person's tragedy.

'The Joy of Life' (2004) plays May 1, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki.