I’m not sure if its totally reader friendly to be blogging so frequently about suicide. Again I would justify it by saying that these bright and sunny summer months are almost peak suicide season, so the Wikipedia statistics tell me. Before you start wondering don’t worry… its not something that I am considering at present!
To stay on topic I watched The Bridge by Eric Steel last night. Its a documentary shot on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The camera crew captured 23 of the 24 people who jumped from the bridge in that year. Its is the most popular suicide destination in the world.
Although its an outsider documenting the suicide jump and isn’t shot as a ‘point of view’ as some self documented suicides might be, it definitely relates somehow to themes of grandiosity or what is referred to in the marketing copy for the film as ‘The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.’ A life spent in torment can perhaps be redeemed by inventing a sensational or glamorous death? If you don’t want to document your own suicide then why not jump at the most notorious suicide location in the world?
Not only did the directors document all of the jumps, but they managed to catch up with eyewitnesses and the friends and families of their suicidal subjects. The perspective that this gives the viewer is harrowing.
So much of the footage is utterly sublime, but there is one particular protagonist who stands out. He is called Gene Sprague and his long hair silhouetted against in the sun almost turns him into a living ghost, even before he jumps. His story runs throughout the film and reaches a crescendo with his jump, which is also spellbinding. Watch it:
The Bridge – clip
Last night I woke up in a sweat at some ridiculous hour, after having a nightmare about being trapped in the department store TJ Hughes. Of course I went straight to twitter to fill the void of fragile, sleepless loneliness and came across this image. Its stolen from a tweet by James (shhh don’t tell him). Its taken out of the same window where we shot the first suicide video…. and I liked seeing it at a delicate hour of the morning, rather than under the fierce sun that was shinning during the weekend when I was there.
I’m told that more people take their own lives in the middle of the day and during the summer than they do at night and in the winter…. seems like the wrong way around, doesn’t it?
I’ve been excessively busy for the past month or so, with a lot of emotional upheaval taking place as a result of being made redundant (a case of being forced to leave just as I was about to walk away) so today I’ve had something of a crash and burn moment and have been very sleepy and a little tearful.
I was trying (and failing) to write this afternoon and an email came through from James about the Ship of Fools residency. He said he’d been having some really positive feedback on the videos we made together earlier this month, which reminded me that I ought to post them on here.
Watching these videos back today, I suddenly feel the pathos in them with twice the intensity that I did previously. I’m pretty sure that as a person who once felt inclined to jump from a high place and float into the abyss, I will always stay haunted by the possibility. Part of my psyche always somehow wants to keep it available as an option…… just in case. And I guess its that part of my psyche that drove me to want to make these videos.
I would love to hear some thoughts and feedback on them, if anyone has some…..
Jump – Part 2
I’ve just returned from a hectic, whistle-stop weekend in London. I went with the duel purpose of looking for somewhere to live and also participating in a residency project with The Vacuum Cleaner http://bit.ly/BK3jp about mental health. While the residency yielded two interesting little videos with a lot of worthwhile discussion, the house hunt ended with two cancelled viewings and a wild goose chase around Archway…… something tells me that looking for somewhere to live in London may require a little tenacity…….
I applied to take part in Ship of Fools http://bit.ly/mMbv2O because I hoped it might help me to start developing some of the ideas that I generate through writing in more visual ways. In particular I’ve retained a morbid fascination with Internet Suicides that originated way before I started this blog. Its odd that it has never really seemed appropriate to write about any of the suicides I have read so much about in any of my posts. I still can’t really articulate what it is about these sad, lonely, yet very public deaths that I find so compelling. Its certainly a very difficult subject to broach, given that most people simply dismiss it as attention seeking or as being too perverse to be worthy of attention.
So I came up with a proposal to document a jump. Fortunately this didn’t require ME to jump off a building (I’ve not had any suicidal thoughts for ages) instead me and James crafted a fairly ingenious low-fi contraption made out of sponges, cardboard and cable ties that would allow a camera phone to make the 17 story drop from the top of his tower block completely intact and still recording video footage. You can see the resulting videos here http://bit.ly/mk6Mis
My favorite part of these films is the hesitation just before the fall. Its powerful to think of making a decision and overcoming that moment where fear threatens to override the wish to jump into oblivion. Obviously we have slowed the footage down to about 10% of its original speed giving the whole thing an air of melancholic detachment.
James and I hope to develop this work somehow, probably first and foremost by just making a lot more videos of ‘jumps’ and seeing which random combinations of falling and spinning create the most interesting video.
