Beyond the Multiplex: Tribeca

May 1, 2006 | All the alleged hipness and glamour of the Tribeca Film Festival were in full effect on a busy weekend of premieres and showcases, but neither glorious weather nor the celebrity sightings that New Yorkers must pretend they don't notice or care about has been able to dispel the funereal mood emanating from the films themselves.

Around the Tribeca Grand Hotel, festival ground zero, the atmosphere feels the same as ever: Doormen give you an imperceptible nod behind their Erik Estrada aviator shades; random semi-famous people (Jeff Goldblum, Mos Def, John Malkovich) drift through the lobby bar; and sooner or later you end up in one of the extraordinary bathrooms, trying to pee into a tiny steel vitrine while standing in a mirrored alcove lined with turquoise tile (the effect is part Spanish-colonial church, part '70s coke flashback). Then you see a movie and the good times pretty much evaporate.

I'm being facetious, but then again, no, I'm not. Maybe it's just a cosmic accident, but this festival has tapped into some deep vein of gloom with no obvious source. The dreariness of our civic and political life late in the Bush era? The slow-dawning realization that independent film is just a kooky niche genre, not unlike fantasy baseball or those books about war my father-in-law reads, only less profitable? The fact that we all know that paying $3.50 a gallon is just a symptom, and what it's a symptom of might well be a planetary terminal illness? Well, all right, those are candidates.

I will not, however, make any jokes on the subject of ending it all. Nearly every picture I've seen here makes some reference to suicide, and you can make of that what you will. If the film that grabbed my attention last week was "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple," this weekend's stunner was Eric Steel's "The Bridge," which documents a year of life and death on America's landmark to suicide, the Golden Gate Bridge. (It premiered almost simultaneously at Tribeca and at the San Francisco International Film Festival.) I still have unanswered moral questions about the film -- unanswered because unanswerable, I suspect -- but it's a beautiful, wrenching, horrifying work of cinema, unlike anything I have ever seen or will see again.

Steel's method has attracted considerable attention: He filmed the bridge during every possible daylight hour for an entire year, from a couple of vantage points on the San Francisco side. One was simply a fixed, wide, "postcard" shot, to ensure that no event occurring anywhere on the bridge during that year would be missed entirely. At the other station, Steel had a camera with a super-long telephoto lens, capable of identifying and following individuals as they walked along the eastern pedestrian pathway. (This isn't discussed in the film, but that's where almost everyone jumps. Perhaps paradoxically, people generally choose to die looking back at civilization, rather than out at the open Pacific or the sunset.)

During that year, which was 2004, 24 people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and died. That's a typical number. Steel and his camera crews witnessed and photographed most of them. The answer to your next question is yes, we see jumpers in the film. Several of them, in fact. Within a few minutes, viewers of the film will become uncannily skilled at picking out likely jumpers in Steel's images: People on the bridge who are alone, lingering, doubling back, a bit too inwardly focused, acting a little off. And I don't care how jaded or steeped in televised pseudo-reality you are; it's profoundly, even inexplicably shocking to see a person, for all the world an ordinary walker out on a beautiful day in one of the world's most dramatic settings, step out of the flow of joggers and bicyclists and slip over that railing.

Next page: Images that will haunt you