Bridges

Bridges (2008, video, 10 mins)


My wife and our children cross the Interstate 35W bridge less than an hour before it fell on August 1, 2007. I was working out of town and managed to get through to them on phone lines jammed with a city full people trying to do the same. As the fear subsided, the anger rose in me accompanied by curiosity about the other bridges in my home town. I started to wonder how to put documentary to work.


As a matter of innovation in film form, I've vowed, whenever possible, to avoid interviews with experts in front of bookcases. Akin to the common argument against "Voice of God" narration that would tell us as viewers what to think (although that argument seems a bit disingenuous, since every other element of a movie, from title to costume, is crafted precisely to lead us to something), expert+bookcase is a convention that deserves to be challenged.


It seemed everyone was already asking, 'How could this happen?' The moment we were having as a nation was much larger than interviews with various engineering and transportation experts, all of which was already happening reasonably well and certainly at length in the news.


There was no need to register shock from bystanders; there's always plenty of that on the news, plus the fact of the event spoke for itself. Curiously, sometimes the more someone onscreen tries to talk about something, the less impact it has. I wasn't particularly interested in the drama of people trying to find words for something. If I put someone on screen, I'd rather they do something for you as viewer to deduce how they feel.


I was having my own grief and anger and relief, not least about my own family, and it was also a collective experience we were having -- at least everyone I spoke with -- trying to understand how a bridge in these United States could fall down with people on it.


I wondered, if I could gather a bit of information about each of the bridges in the area and show it back-to-back quickly enough, whether a pattern would emerge: old bridge to young, long bridge to short, north end of town to south. By late afternoon August 10th I was perched on the front of my friend's duck boat.




"Bridges" premiered at 2008 Square Lake Film and Music Festival.
It was shown on Twin Cities Public Television as part of MNTV 2008, a program of Minnesota-produced short films presented by Twin Cities Public Television in partnership with IFP Minneapolis/St. Paul, the Walker Art Center and Intermedia Arts, funded by the Jerome Foundation.
It has been shown at Art-a-Whirl in both 2008 (504 California) and 2010 (wa-ter clo-set gallery).