Jenni Olson, The Royal Road, 2015

Instigated in part by a troubled longdistance relationship that found Olson based in San Francisco and the object of her affection in L. A., The Royal Road treats the physical landscape of California as a kind of palimpsest of conflicting desires romantic and sexual, colonial and political. In the film, Olson chooses to emphasize the various disruptions of the historic road that is her subject, El Camino Real, both through her formalist approach and her digressive storytelling. The general format of The Royal Road is one of fixedframe shots of relative duration, all of them characterized by a tendency to keep human activity at a distance. Instead, Olson asks us to consider spatial relationships: the San Francisco Bay, a statue of Serra on a cliff overlooking a city, a winding bit of road that curls around a house like a private driveway, or a distant fragment of an anonymous freeway noteworthy only because of one of those mission bells. As Olson provides these select views, we hear her voiceover providing