![]() He crossed the boundary between anthropological distance and subjective reality, and it's hard not to feel that by including this dramatic incident, suspensefully edited by Sabine Krayenbühl, Steel is expressing ambivalence about his own inability to do the same. You can forgive him for grabbing one last photograph of the would-be jumper's bitter, jutting face as she is bundled into the police car, since he overcame so boldly that feeling of insulation provided by the camera. But Waters eventually heaved the woman back over the railing. "When I was behind the camera, it was almost like it wasn't real 'cos I was looking through the lens," explains Waters, inadvertently articulating suspicions viewers may be harbouring about Steel. His first reaction was simply to continue snapping - and Steel films him doing just that. Richard Waters recounts how he was taking photographs on the bridge when a woman climbed on to the ledge. Steel includes one story - the film's single uplifting episode - that provides a wry commentary on his own role and responsibilities as a film-maker. Impotence is a common feeling among cinema audiences, trapped in their seats and unable to influence the on-screen action, but that abstract discomfort is sharpened to its severest point in The Bridge. The Bridge is an evocation of impotence in which powerlessness is manifested at every level, from the stories of the victims to the testimonies of the friends and families reduced to onlookers in the darkening lives of their loved ones, and finally to our blunt horror at watching strangers die. The knowledge that he alerted the authorities whenever he saw someone behaving suspiciously hardly makes us feel better that the cameras kept rolling.īut this footage lends the picture a thematic force far beyond its initial shock value. First-time director Eric Steel, a former Disney executive, stationed his cameras at various positions in view of the bridge and shot throughout 2004, during which there were 24 successful suicide attempts. Our longing to interrupt the ensuing showreel of suicides is superseded by our disbelief that the film-makers haven't themselves intervened, rather than concentrating their efforts on keeping the bodies, which plummet into the water at around 120mph, centre-screen. In the first few minutes of this documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge and its unenviable position as the world's number-one suicide hotspot, a white-haired man in a baseball cap hoists himself over the 4ft safety rail and drops to his death with a mixture of clumsiness and boredom. ![]() There is no nice way of saying it: The Bridge is a downer. ![]() An end title reveals that more people have chosen to end their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world. Also interviewed is Richard Waters, who prevented a woman from jumping, and Kevin Hines, who miraculously survived a leap. Interviews with the friends and families of some of the 24 people who died after jumping from the bridge in 2004 are intercut with footage of actual deaths. Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.Ī documentary about the popularity of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge as a site for suicide attempts. ![]()
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