The Bridge

While I watched the movie, I had a very strong reaction to the Richard Waters piece. As I watched him speak of his interactions with the woman he found on the bridge, I was not only aghast as I listened to his initial apathy. His statements of being "behind the lens" and thinking that "he could do nothing to help her" hit me quite hard. My mind was cluttered with disbelief as it sounded as though Waters would watch this woman jump to her death, without so much as an attempt to help her. This then led me to think about the movie as a whole. Again, as we watched, I thought of what it meant that the film makers were doing nothing as they watched people kill themselves. While it may be true that the police were contacted whenever an attempt seemed apparent, I still find it hard to come to terms with the fact that we watched film of people killing themselves. Of course, this means that the camera people all watched, "through a lens," as this happened live. I had a hard time deciding if this footage was real at first and I wonder what it must have been like to watch these people in reality. Perhaps they all felt like Waters, that because they were behind a lens the reality was subdued. If this is true, our watching the film through the lens and the editing room leads us even further from reality, depositing us as some place between perception and opinion.