The second portion of Olson’s film is purely auditory. We’re in the dark as the voice of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, perhaps San Francisco’s most famous beatnik poet, invokes the particularity of the city’s majestic light:

"The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light, and the light of fog blanketing the hills, drifting in at night through the golden gate to lie on the city at dawn, and then the halcyon late mornings after the fog burns off and the sun paints White Houses with the sea light of Greece, with sharp, clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted, but the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills, and then the veil of light of early morning, and then another scrim, when the new night fog floats in and in that vale of light the city drifts, anchorless, upon the ocean."

Ferlinghetti’s description of the exquisite watercolors of San Francisco in his poem “The Changing Light” echoes the images of the city depicted lovingly by Olson’s camera, and acts the connective tissue between the film’s earlier visions and diary-like confessional material about dyke longing and the final portion of The Joy of Life, which, surprisingly, is about death.

Here again Dodge’s voice acts as our guide, and again we’re granted gorgeously framed and naturally-lit images, this time of the Golden Gate bridge and surroundings from assorted angles.

While The Joy of Life’s camera work is first complimented by prose and secondly, by poetry, its third spoken text is expository. The film morphs into documentary mode, focusing on the Golden Gate Bridge as the world’s suicide hot spot. This historically-informed exposé of the political waffling that’s occurred on whether or not install higher guard rails on the bridge despite more than 1300 deaths since May of 1937 holds the municipality, original architects, and bridge officials culpable for the steady stream of near-weekly jumps. Most people leap facing east, the narrator surmises, because the pedestrian walkway provides easy access, but also because facing the city, their acts are perhaps intended as symbolic of being pushed to despair by San Francisco itself.

The film details how, hitting the water at approximately 55 miles an hour, a person’s chance of death is 98% certain.

Dedicated to Olson’s close friend, Mark, who, sadly, was one the bridge’s suicides, this work acts as part city film-poem (a la 1921’s Manhatta), part Sister Spit-esque urban-dyke’s spoken word, but most movingly as an activist’s statement—a call for the higher guard rail that has been missing for decades in favor of retaining an oh-so pretty view from one of San Francisco’s most populated tourist attractions.

Olson’s filmic elegy, which played to full crowds at 2005’s Sundance Film Festival, ultimately celebrates life. It celebrates the ocular splendor of the world we live in as well as the very human tendency to desire. Both the pleasures and the pains of desire are gifts, Olson seems to say, to remind us how alive we are.

Joy of Life screens at Outfest in L.A. on July 9 and 15, 2005;
find out more about the film at JoyofLifeMovie.com

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