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Finding The Bridge:
I first came across The Bridge when I found its trailer on the Apple web site. The text under the trailer warns you that it "May contain disturbing subject matter." At some point, the trailer changed between mid-September and the media coverage surrounding the film prior to its release in October of 2006. In the edited version of the trailer that I saw, there was a man on a cell phone, and I can only guess that when that image kept being discussed so prominently in interviews with Steel that it was pulled from the trailer to give people more of an incentive to see the film. When I saw the trailer for The Bridge in early September, it didn't strike me as particularly notable-- morbid, yes, notable, no-- and I filed the film in my head next to other documentaries about suicide.
Later, in the Chicago Reader, I read a write-up of the film and was stunned by the vehemence, derision, and contempt with which it was panned as "a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn." Curious, I began doing research, and I contacted Steel about setting up an interview. When we eventually talked, Steel was polite and clearly knowledgeable about the issues surrounding the film, the politics surrounding suicide and the Golden Gate. He had, it seemed, mainly conceived the film in terms of bearing witness to suicide at a public location that, in relation to other public monuments and spaces, seems conspicuously overlooked.
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