I sat in the back of our new van in Bristol watching Jenni Olson’s “cinematic essay”, The Royal Road (2015), while the two sisters chatted under the conker trees during their mother’s last days.
“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, and yet partially successful effort to stop time. I now own the landscapes that I love. I preserve them in the amber of celluloid so that I might re-experience these visions of dappled sunlight, the calm of a warm afternoon, and the framing of an alley as it recedes into the distance. These images serve as a reminder of what once was and as a prompt to appreciate what now is.” (Olson, transcribed from The Royal Road, 2015).