Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Sean Uyehara’s review of The Royal Road by Jenni Olson. Uyehara notes that the film echoes “…dreams, those deferred and distorted forms of wish fulfillment, where the destination is never reached and that inevitably lead back to the thorny, tangled territory of the unconscious.” This article was originally published on March 12, 2015.

Jenni Olson. The Royal Road; 2015 (film still); 16mm/HD; 65:00. Courtesy of Jenni Olson Productions.

Jenni Olson’s second feature-length narrative film, The Royal Road (2015), which I saw as part of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition, solidifies her standing as a major voice in the use of film as personal essay. The film is primarily composed of two elements—Olson’s self-consciously butch voiceover narration paired with long takes of beautifully composed empty urban landscapes. However, this spare approach belies a sly complexity, as the film burrows into the endlessly mineable terrains of history, memory, and culture.

Olson’s previous narrative feature, The Joy of Life (2005), both elucidates the social-psychological conditions that position the Golden Gate Bridge as a suicide monument and relates Olson’s deep personal connection to it as a site of loss. A devastating work of art, the film also played a pivotal role in renewing public debate about the need for a suicide barrier on the bridge. In The Royal Road, Olson again performs the double move of disentangling and recombining her personal identity from and within the larger cultural landscape that has shaped it, this time focusing on another California landmark rich with metaphoric resonance: El Camino Real.

Read the full article here.