The bridge

Stimulated by a 2003 New Yorker article exploring "the fatal grandeur" of California's Golden Gate Bridge, the world's most popular suicide destination, film producer Steel began what is surely one of the most controversial and provocative directorial debuts in recent years by obtaining a permit under false pretenses, deploying a camera crew around the bridge during nearly every daylight hour between January and December 2004, and intentionally capturing the final moments of 23 of the approximately two dozen suicides that occurred that year. (Steel claims that six near-suicides were prevented by the crew's policy of speed-dialing bridge authorities when a suicide appeared likely.) The documentary Steel constructs around this questionable material is, however, far less controversial than the morality of the methods involved in its production. Footage of six suicides is featured, but its appearance occurs within a context composed mostly of absorbing interviews with friends, relatives, and witnesses of those who died (and, incredibly, one jumper who survived) interwoven with shots of the bridge from a variety of angles and times of day. Although the interviews suggest some common traits among the victims (mental illness, depression, and, perhaps, the cumulative power of chronic disappointment), Steel refrains from explicitly addressing the question of why the bridge should be the chosen site, opting instead to leave one in humble wonder by revisiting the bridge's expansive beauty from so many different vantages and under so many different effects of weather and light. Recommended, with care, for most collections.-Robert A. Sica, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Richmond (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.