The Joy of Life, a film by Jenni Olson
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About the Title
The original manuscript I wrote for the film was called Fuck Diary. After considerable thought I decided this might be a bit of a liability when it came to fundraising.
The title I eventually landed on came from an old cigarette advertisement. This gigantic ad for Omar Cigarettes was painted on the side of a hotel at Mason and Ellis downtown San Francisco (as of late 2004 it’s still there). I used to walk past this building a few times a week on my way to lunch and was always so excited to see the tagline: “The Joy of Life.” (Yes, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate tagline for a cigarette ad).
The phrase made me feel simultaneously happy and sad every time I thought of it so it seemed like a good title for my film.
Most people who haven’t seen the film imagine it must be an ironic title, especially since my film deals in part with suicide. The truth is, I arrived at the title long before I decided to explore the history of Golden Gate Bridge suicide. There is no irony intended at all. I’ve always been touched by the phrase as an earnest, poignant expression of what I want to say as an artist. For me, it conveys my aspiration to be fully alive and in the moment.
The title also hints at something else I hope people will appreciate about the film and that’s the fact that it’s ultimately a melodrama—in the sense that melodrama is all about a heightened sense of emotion and taking things really seriously.
I also like that The Joy of Life evokes the schmaltzy Frank Capra classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, which is referenced in the film in my capsule production history of Capra’s other great suicide-themed melodrama, Meet John Doe.
The final quote at the end of the film (which also references “the joy of life”) fortuitously arrived in my e-mail In Box on our last day of picture editing. It’s a quote from Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther which came to me as a result of having subscribed to the www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com daily email newsletter in the course of my research for the suicide section of the film. I was never able to get through the precious over-the-top prose of the novel in book format with its agonizing passions and sensational longing. But it’s brilliant in bite-size daily doses.
Here's the quote:
"Whatever be my fate hereafter, I can never say that I have not tasted joy — the purest joy of life." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
The original manuscript I wrote for the film was called Fuck Diary. After considerable thought I decided this might be a bit of a liability when it came to fundraising.
The title I eventually landed on came from an old cigarette advertisement. This gigantic ad for Omar Cigarettes was painted on the side of a hotel at Mason and Ellis downtown San Francisco (as of late 2004 it’s still there). I used to walk past this building a few times a week on my way to lunch and was always so excited to see the tagline: “The Joy of Life.” (Yes, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate tagline for a cigarette ad).
The phrase made me feel simultaneously happy and sad every time I thought of it so it seemed like a good title for my film.
Most people who haven’t seen the film imagine it must be an ironic title, especially since my film deals in part with suicide. The truth is, I arrived at the title long before I decided to explore the history of Golden Gate Bridge suicide. There is no irony intended at all. I’ve always been touched by the phrase as an earnest, poignant expression of what I want to say as an artist. For me, it conveys my aspiration to be fully alive and in the moment.
The title also hints at something else I hope people will appreciate about the film and that’s the fact that it’s ultimately a melodrama—in the sense that melodrama is all about a heightened sense of emotion and taking things really seriously.
I also like that The Joy of Life evokes the schmaltzy Frank Capra classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, which is referenced in the film in my capsule production history of Capra’s other great suicide-themed melodrama, Meet John Doe.
The final quote at the end of the film (which also references “the joy of life”) fortuitously arrived in my e-mail In Box on our last day of picture editing. It’s a quote from Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther which came to me as a result of having subscribed to the www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com daily email newsletter in the course of my research for the suicide section of the film. I was never able to get through the precious over-the-top prose of the novel in book format with its agonizing passions and sensational longing. But it’s brilliant in bite-size daily doses.
Here's the quote:
"Whatever be my fate hereafter, I can never say that I have not tasted joy — the purest joy of life." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther