i just started watching robert kramer´s film "route one" (the first two hours i´ve seen so far) and already felt the urge in my fingertips to press these buttons in excitement and put some of my feelings about this film into words and sentences, giving them bodies of their own, something outside my head, so i won´t forget so quickly and they´ll be there, while i go on.
i love the way he starts this film, and even though i´m not such a fan of jazz music in film scores anymore (just seen too much of it, -cassavetes, malle, the beat films...), it works here and you really get into the flow of his travelling without a goal, travelling for travelling, thinking while walking, letting the events in time become the film.
the film follows "doc", the filmmaker, who has been gone for ten years and comes back to the u.s.a., everything has changed, everything stayed the same. he drives down route one with a cameraman. this is the film.
it at first reminded me of debord´s philosophy "ne travaillez jamais!" (don´t ever work), meaning of course not to work for something not in your view, not to work estranged from yourself, for something you know nothing about, that lies outside your personal sphere, that you don´t care for, something meaningless and merely functional, working for something that deprives you of living a life.
only to work for love, was the idea, for the thing itself, for the joy and pleasure and satisfaction of doing something just for the sake of it. without purpose. without future. without career. just out of desire and interest and celebration of the moment.
what i so appreciate is the way the production of the film is already the film, the way he doesn´t know where he´s heading and what he´s after, but will do it to find out retrospectively and then know and draw the lines between the dots. he doesn´t really know why he´s making this film, and he´s making it. that´s strong. he has nothing to prove, nothing to tell, has not found out some words of wisdom, he´s just travelling down a very very long street with the longing to take pictures and talk to others to record what they say. making the film is just a pretext for being able to get in contact with other people, you wouldn´t meet otherwise, a pretext to do the travelling and follow the direction of your desire. or cluelessness.
everything starts making and creating sense, one incident put next to the other. a collage of time, of aggregate states, of concrete little, lived lives and universal stories, of the past immanent in the presence, of succesions and chains, of ideas and aspirations, of things broken apart but still together. a world fallen apart into a mosaic, still a picture, but the glue between the shards being visible.
