San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson's evocative cinema poem to California's 600-mile-long El Camino Real, The Royal Road begins where all good films about film should, by quoting movie genius Billy Wilder from his 1950 masterwork Sunset Boulevard. The image of William Holden's character floating upside-down and dead in Gloria Swanson's mad Norma Desmond's swimming pool is too good to improve on, and so far nobody has. But Olson makes an imaginative and eloquent stab by beginning her journey with the chapter heading, "My Hollywood Love Story." We all have them, and Olson's doesn't disappoint.
Olson informs us, "I want to tell you stories about love and loss that tell more about me than I ever expected to say." One of Olson's obsessions explored here is the lesbian community's ongoing discussion about butch/fem. She also connects the dots between herself and theatre giant Tony Kushner, whose comments jumpstart The Royal Road : "Everything new is better than everything old. 'The bad new things instead of the good old things,' wrote that great dialectical playwright, poet and theorist Bertolt Brecht. I love the rigor of that challenge. To be able to risk the Satanic temptation and a retreat backwards towards what's easy, familiar and safe – the remembered past, which is always misremembered. To always be on guard against nostalgia. To be able to see the future in the bad new things."
To which Olson adds, "Aside from introducing the burden of Tony Kushner's disapproval into my life, this speech has prompted me to reflect at length and somewhat obsessively on my aversion to the bad new things and my affection for the old. To this day, I suffer from a compulsion to defend my overly intense attachment to the past."
Having grabbed our attention with this unusual confession, Olson lays out her most passionate pleasures. "All I want to do is read novels and go to the movies. I crave the catharsis of narratives. Those contained portrayals of life that give us the vicarious desolation and heartbreak, inspiration and triumph we don't even know that we need."
Then Olson ups the stakes for this 65-minute journey down our state's most challenging landscape by describing Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 San Francisco-set film Vertigo "as a sort of cinematic ode to nostalgia. It's a cautionary tale really, about the pull of the past and the futility of striving for things that are unreachable precisely because they only exist in the long ago."
Olson defends her attraction "to landscapes and buildings [because] unlike people, they tend to endure for many generations. They possess an intimacy with the past that no person, however old, can approach.
"I've been filming the landscapes of San Francisco since just a few years after I arrived here. In capturing these images on film, I'm engaged in a completely impossible yet partially successful effort to stop time." The filmmaker confesses, "I continue to search for inspiration in the movies just like I did when I was little. I'm inordinately obsessed with the stories of others, seeking within them the key to sharing my own."
Some of us regret the abandonment of old literary forms for the digital age's flashy new tricks. Jenni Olson is a talented filmmaker who has resolutely kept a foot in both camps.
The Royal Road (Wolfe DVD) features: Go Fish filmmakers Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche interview Jenni Olson; selected shorts by Olson: 575 Castro St., Meep Meep!, Blue Diary and Sometimes.