Contemplating the early-morning sun as it decorates the still-cold houses is something most of us grant merely a few seconds pause, perhaps on our doorsteps before jetting off to work, to the gym, to awful traffic. The play of natural light isn’t ordinarly a subject given much screen time in films, either.

But in its first twenty minutes or so, queer film historian Jenni Olson’s 65-minute experimental feature functions as a sort of hymn to the half-blue, half-yellow hue that casts a glow upon the bayside architecture of San Francisco daily.

What glues together the landscape cinematography of The Joy of Life’s first segment, which is simply stunning to behold, is a personal narrative of one butch lesbian's search for intimacy through sex with multiple partners—partners as varied as the palette of Frisco’s buildings, and intimacy as fleeting as each day’s awakening—delivered in voice-over by By Hook or By Crook’s warm-toned Harry Dodge.

The narrator admits with a tinge of melancholia: “What I want most is people to like me,” and furthermore “even if she says yes, the girl only wants me for my charming façade and illusory butch strength.” Admitting a “desire for nurturing,” the narrator’s yearning for love is palpable and reflected in the lonely shots of empty streets, of graffiti marking places on walls where someone once was.

Here the intricate details of a single lesbian’s private life are married to images of public space, but a city scarcely peopled, still slumbering.

The film feels intensely personal--we become wrapped up in one woman’s drama, even as visually we are fed long glances at walls and signs and windows from the unseen eye of the camera.

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