Walking through a department store electronics department, i catch a fragment of conversation; some old couple talking to the white-shirt-and blue-tie sales kid right  by the display of SatNav and GPS systems.

"It knows where you are.." he's saying.

"Yes, it knows where you are.." they are saying in reply, like an out-of-synch stereo, "But do you have to know your destination..."

I know that these kinds of sales kids have a bad rep for not knowing much. But this question and its implications might well defy the best of us.

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Also:

Their voices weaving in and out of each other like an out of synch stereo.

Their voices sounding less like conversation and more like the early stages of a Steve Reich tape recorder experiment from the 1970's.

Yes. Yes.
It Knows. Knows. Where you. Yes. Where you are. It knows.
But do you? OK? Yes. But do you. Really. Do you have to know your destination?
Do you have to? Ahh. KNow where you're going? Do you need to know that?
Is it necessary to know the destination? Because. That's what we were wondering. Otherwise. That's what we wanted to know.

[Really liking these two, even though I only caught this tiny fragment of them.. feels like a Dickensian shtick one could work with. The doubled voice, the binary, the weaving, repetition. A hideous symbiotic creature.]

Following yesterdays post my friend D sent a link - here - to a clip showing Godard's contribution to the Wim Wender's 1982 documentary Room 666. Godard rambles in fine form, talking about the future of cinema and other things, wrong on some ideas (small things and small countries will disappear) cryptic for the most part, and right (so far as I can tell) on others.

Television is nothing to be afraid of... he says. It's so small and you have to be very close to the picture. In the cinema, on the other hand, the picture is large and intimidating and you watch it from a distance. Today it seems people would rather look at a small picture close up than a large one from a distance.

Hard to calculate the ironies or otherwise of watching this fragment on youTube where the movie itself is cut up and stripped to its bones, distribution is all the time and everywhere (I mean that with some irony), and the picture got even smaller.

My friend A. send a nice quote, translated from an interview with Jean Luc Godard in Zeit.

We [he and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville] try to imagine the film together. We try to recall it. It's as if clouds take shape, very slowly. I try to see things with my eyes closed because you don't see the same thing with your eyes open. It's not any different with a camera. You use open eyes to see with closed eyes.

Elsewhere online (here) I found a few other quotes from the same interview. I liked this one, for its summoning of an entirely solitary film-making practice.

Godard: It's not as easy as it used to be to use a camera to see something you otherwise wouldn't see. Directors are either confirming what they already know - or they're confirming themselves with the camera. Like a knight would confirm himself with a lance. I'm going to shoot my next film alone - but really alone. I'll adapt. I won't film the actors together, but instead, one after another. I'll make reservations in the hotel, too, if they come here to Switzerland. These are different films, but they're possible. Fortunately, I wasn't able to make all the films I wanted to.

KN: Why "fortunately"?

Godard: [laughs] Because they wouldn't have been good.

The first part of this brought to mind a film I've never seen but which has always intrigued me as a concept - Wim Wenders’ documentary Room 666 for which, at Cannes Festival in 1982, he set up a static camera in an empty hotel room, inviting a number of directors to come in and give their thoughts, alone to the camera, on the future of cinema. Despite the fact that I've never seen this film I've often thought of remaking it - creating a contemporary performance and dance-makers 'version' of it. Maybe as a form the solo to camera has been too entirely colonised by all those many reality show diary rooms, and confession-cams, but I'm still intrigued by the solitary space - a hotel room, a question and a camera. I might work on a proposal.

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Meanwhile I got back from a site visit to Rovereto for Manifesta 7.

Wendy wrote from Australia re the lag and travel horrors, this time long haul - see my text  version of something connected - motion stasis - here. 

1st day: everything moving but with no discernible rhythm. 2nd day : the back of my body arrives. 3rd day : more breath but then a deep, deep emptying – almost like falling for hours. 4th day: rhythm coming back into the walk and a smile that means it. 5th day :the cartilage seems to connect up. 6th day: stamina returning with desire to walk for hours and hours. 7th day: tiredness that comes from being able to recognise sensation in the body. 8th day: deeper tiredness combined with desire to go out for a drink but not able to fulfil the desire due to tiredness. 9th day: false sense of complete control combined with ineffectual suggestions at work. 10th day: suppleness returns, along with appetite and real taste and ability to notice other people. i heard it takes a day for every time zone crossed so eleven days would be about right.

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My pics from arrivals in Munich the other day.