Travelling / Plan 234 / Extérieur Nuit

DIAGNOSING TRAUMA

Christa Blümlinger (1999)

In a scene from Godard's Nouvelle Vague the camera moves along the façade of a night-illuminated villa, pauses briefly at its corner, and then mirrors its way back again to the starting point and the couple, Delon - Giordana. On its way back, the camera follows the movements of the housemaid, who puts out all the lamps, one by one. The travelling here takes place within the materiality of its own movement: The covering up and putting out of one window image after the other assumes the pose of the slow unfolding of a filmstrip in the projector. In this journey, the camera disregards the two main characters for several minutes to compose the movement of an apparently irrelevant sequence: vanishing, reappearing, slipping out anew. From the start, the history of the Godardian lovers registers this characterization of withdrawal. Concerning such movements, Godard says that, like Ophüls, he shifts them into the center in order to accentuate an essential silence.

Constanze Ruhm's recent video, "travelling," adopts precisely this symptomatic movement taken from Nouvelle Vague to conceptually present its function within a virtual space. Only a few pieces of furniture remain visible in Ruhm's three-dimensional journey along the façade and - as in the apartment of her first Godard video study - the human figures are missing altogether. The difference between the two movements through virtual spaces lies in the fact that in "travelling" we are dealing with a journey that measures the space in, analogous with the film, a "mechanical" and uninterrupted movement.

By contrast, "apartment" appears not as an anthropomorphous gaze, yet corresponds in its direction - changing and returning with white "fade-ins" of cinematic rhythmicization through subjectives and alternate takes. In "apartment," Ruhm is concerned with the central and overlong sequence from Le Mépris in which Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli portray a couple who are about to split up. If the subjectives assigned to the two characters are interrupted by a kind of virtual visual focus in the Godardian sequence, then only to present the spatial separateness of the two bodies that continuously move about a labyrinthine apartment. Constanze Ruhm radicalizes this Godardian mise-en-scene by applying the virtual, unshared, outer gaze of Bardot's body and makes it dependant on its positions and movements. The characters no longer disappear - as they do in film - into the frame or out of the frame; they are also no longer measures of spatial representation. All that remains of the body of Bardot / Camille in this emptied virtual space is a mere trace of movement - in the same way that the trace of film bodies in "travelling" can only be guessed via the changing focus.

In Ruhm, it is the extensive renouncement of analogies of cinematic image materiality that exhibits its figurative strategy: thus the digital photography in "deserto" refers to Antonioni's aesthetic of denudation; "lost" alludes to the confusion of the viewer, who - even after seeing Lynch's movie several times - can barely guess at the meaning of the disappearance of a figure from the frame: "shadow" relates to the use of metaphor in a film by Resnais / Duras that deals with the un-representable. Constanze Ruhm's digital photographs diagnose movement images as symptoms. In this way, "surdité" shows a neon sign from Truffaut's La nuit américaine that was only momentarily visible in the film. The lettering surdité (deafness) is based on a cineaste's dream-within-a-film. where it becomes associated with the letters cinéma. The word surdité leads the viewer back to an attribute of the dreamer: the director's hearing-aid. Here, Ruhm's "surdité" localizes a trauma in the form of a symbol and not its content: Roland Barthes also describes the process of cinematic conceptualization via "traumatic units" as a dialectic between the question triggered by (visual) perception and the answer that is given through "comprehension" or via verbal language.

from: CAMERA AUSTRIA 66 / 1999. Translation: Warren Rosenzweig

On the occasion of the exhibition "Kino wie noch nie" (Curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki), "travelling" was revised, re-rendered and newly released in 2005, based on the original 1999-version (3D-models, rendering: Emil Stefanov).