Travelling - Plan 234 / Extérieur Nuit

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. // Text: from: CAMERA AUSTRIA 66 / 1999. Christa Blümlinger, Translation: Warren Rosenzweig

(Source: constanze ruhm | Travelling / Plan 234 / Extérieur Nuit,)