The Logic of the Obliterated Moment

Maren Lübbke: Your works - both the videos and your photographs - emerge in response to cinematic material. Why is the film important as referent, though it's no longer identifiable in the work itself?

Constanze Ruhm: I gather information from which I develop a kind of metainformation, only to then allow it to vanish in the work. That is, I work uninterruptedly against myself - counterproductive. When I use a film scene for an image, nearly all the information arising from the scene is eliminated, leaving only the architecture or lighting conditions - apparent formal aspects that are not purely formal visually. This disposition serves me as film stock for another story, which is laid over an existing one.

Lübbke: What are the kind of stories that interest you?

Ruhm: There's a kind of collective memory of images that are familiar to everyone and suggestive of personal experiences. These images spring from a commonly accessible reservoir that interests me: It supplies us with technical imagery, photography, TV, and cinema - including the stories we grew up with that were molded from them. I try to establish specific patterns and to grasp these structures both individually and superindividually at the same time. I don't see my pictures as photos of specific, subjective memory devices, but rather as that which releases them, their triggers. It's also about something like a synopsis of dispositives that arrange themselves via visual constructions. Although no one really knows these places I describe, there's still this kind of uncanny familiarity ...

Lübbke: You are concemed, then, to exploit the human visual memory, which does not necessarily have to relate to anything that has ever actually been seen, but that is available and, therefore, reality-constituted. We know of course that film is a means of fictionalization, but also that film equally affects our perceptions of reality, or rather establishes reality for us. This also applies to the level of emotions that the film establishes and which is experienced as real.

Ruhm: I work within this interspace of construction and emotion. These two elements are constitutive to my work, because I don't merely wonder how pictures are constructed, rather also how emotions may be constructed. Why is a film that I actually find bad still able to bring me to tears? It's this perfidious mechanism of transference that interests me. The patient is able to know about his suffering without being able to influence it.

Lübbke: In general, it's about the phenomenon of collective memory and its modes of operation. Is it not in a narrower context, however, also about separation? Since the film scenes you draw from all deal with love and bereavement.

Ruhm: Those are themes which people must examine for themselves. I thematize these things in my work, however, as they are classical paradigms of cinematic narration: the couple, love, the disfunction of relationships. the fatal constellation of gender, which are indeed the products of a social reality. What can film space add to what may be said about the loss that has occurred within it? I play with the histories others have invented and which I reduce to specific components.

Lübbke: Why exactly is it that in the scenes you reproduce on computer no further details or figures emerge, but only architecture and light? Is it a matter of a kind of reflection of social reality in architecture?

Ruhm: In a certain sense, yes - I build spaces in which, while there are no more people, a human presence is still felt. A good example is a new computer animation of mine. It's based on a long panning sequence in the film Nouvelle Vague by Jean-Luc Godard. At the point in the film when the lovers are standing at the window and, for this reason, the camera shifts focus from the background to the foreground, the background in the animation also blurs. The camera has therefore lost the object of its focus. The blurred picture is nothing more than a reference to that which is absent. I try to take the things apart in order to reexamine the theory that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Lübbke: To examine or corroborate?

Ruhm: The denudation is an attempt to rearrange a specific arrangement that was invented by someone else. The cinematic narration - this fiction machine - naturally functions at a specific level of reception. These phenomena move me and, in a continuation of this movement, I move them off again from me with a question. I try to change the function of a structure by means of subversive affirmation.

Lübbke: A political question ...

Ruhm: Exactly - a political question. To what extent can one intervene in context - on the level of perception, on the level of the allegedly personal way of seeing ... That would be a beginning. In no way do I believe that my works are free of deception insofar as they are liberated from certain elements. For that which I produce is also a kind of fiction, is also manipulative, and I consciously set up the deception, the mistakes, and the lies as well. The means employed are, in fact, part of this context. In this way, I also want to free myself from the morality of deconstruction.

Lübbke: But you work in a rather suggestive way ...

Ruhm: Yes, I analyze a specific excerpt of cinematic style and apply the remains as a suggestive platform.

Lübbke: Alongside all your critical reflection on cinema and television are also overtones of great enthusiasm for the "fiction machine" of film.

Ruhm: Yes, but the fascination clashes with a great scepticism. These are simultaneities that are decisive for my work insofar as they seek to erect inclinations in proportion to a conceptual distance.

Lübbke: In addition to your computer animations, what prompts you to turn a film still into a photo through computer reconstruction to create an independent, static representation?

Ruhm: Moving pictures have a completely different power of persuasion than static images, I don't believe, however, in a hierarchy of images in this sense. The question concerns the seams: Where does a moving picture end, where does a static one begin? How do we perceive, how do we read this image, and why is the one function completely different than the other? What's interesting is that the impression of movement reemerges through the stringing together of static images; through the becoming invisible of the individual image's frozen moment - and this is not mainly a technical problem.

Lübbke: ... therefore an experiment on how perception, seeing, or narration function?

Ruhm: Yes, exactly. For example, the architecture of the individual image within the digital frame often acts differently than in the film from which I started out. It's the attempt to incorporate my perception - with all its intrinsic sources of error - in the reconstruction of a cinematic space.

Lübbke: A search for errors within the system of human perception; a kind of research into perception ...

Ruhm: Not in a scientific way, but yes. Again, a good example is the work I spoke about earlier - the reconstruction of a Godardian scene from the film Nouvelle Vague. The only reason the computer animation which it's based on is in black and white is that I could only watch the film on my TV in black and white. The film was shot in color, but my TV can't show the French television standard, SECAM, in color. Whenever the technology fails, I bring myself - or my means - directly into play. I calculate unforeseen empty spaces into this technological construct.

Lübbke: Do the formats that you use for your photographs represent a reference to the cinemascope format - again a technological construct - or do they also allude to the classical landscape format?

Ruhm: We've all seen a desert in a John Ford western. In this context, how do we look upon a real desert? Does it remind us of the movies? I think that in a certain way we do, indeed, see things in TV or in wide-screen format. I mean metaphorically, of course, as a memory format. This is particularly interesting in painting, which deals with completely different problems with regard to formats. My formats represent a psychological as well as morphological reference to cinematography which, again, is a technical format.

Lübbke: But it could also happen that seeing a desert I might suddenly have a completely different spatial experience from the one created by John Ford.

Ruhm: We don't always know exactly how or why we perceive something in our self-consciousness and our bodies, and, accordingly, experience a scene from a movie in many different ways – not just with our eyes but also with memory. In the same ways that conversations function on various levels and are often discursive fields of associations. For example, the referentiality of art discourse, which is always meta-, retro- and so on. This form of secondary conversation has long become a conventional form of conversation, or discourse, which – on the basis of their subjects – often refers to secondary literature or indexes.

Lübbke: So, in your work, you produce something like a secondary form of conversation on a visual level?

Ruhm: While the referent in my work is no longer recognizable, still something else is there to be read. For example, the empty apartment from Le Mépris: If one doesn't know the referent, one might still perceive the work as a white cube. And this is something I am also playing with. For instance, I reconstructed museum rooms from the movie Dressed to Kill, leaving out, however, the art works displayed in them.

Lübbke: Isn't that the film in which a man and a woman flirt with each other inside a museum ...

Ruhm: That's exactly the scene I used. The whole scene is coded on multiple levels. It plays in a museum. Well-known works are hanging on the walls – an Alex Katz, for example. And then there are the two actors, sitting beside each other on a bench in front of this Katzian painting. She removes her gloves, so that one can see – her flirt, that is – that she's wearing a wedding ring. She does this to send out a very clear message to him: I am a married woman looking for an adventure. Even if one hasn't seen the movie, the reconstruction of that scene makes at least one thing clear: What's going on here pertains to some kind of institution. The architecture suggests a museum; on an architectonic plane, the coding is clear. With the museum, we are back in art and at a further crossing.

Lübbke: You built this dysfunctional house – which consists of several rooms that you reconstructed on the computer. In another one of your works, you bring together details from a diversity of films: the curtain is from a different film than the banister, the color of the steps differs from the film they are from, and so on.

Ruhm: These arrangements take my own works as their starting point – a self-relating system of reference. I count on, so to speak, a certain kind of readability that my work may gain over the course of time.

Lübbke: A system of reference that could also be understood as a kind of phenomenology of spaces with specific qualities?

Ruhm: Yes, the works establish their own system of coordinates of the memories of others which, in turn, refer back to film stills. Everything taken together leads to a completely absurd architecture – no one could ever live in such a house, since it is about an ironic distortion of architecture.

Lübbke: What role does time play for you, considering that, in film, time can be compacted or expanded? In an image, however, time is frozen – film time is summarized as a static picture.

Ruhm: On this subject, there are some wonderful related errors that show how the fiction in film reveals itself unintentionally. There is a scene in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly from the fourties. Mike Hammer is a detective who is being followed somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. The scene was shot in real time and is supposed to be experienced that way by the viewer. The main character is heading through a dark alley when he looks back to see whether he is still being pursued and then keeps going. Unfortunately, in the background, one can see a clock that shows completely varying times inside the same three minutes and by the end of the scene, not three, but twenty minutes have passed. And that's just so interesting, since it shows how fiction mistakes itself through a simple error.

Lübbke: What prompted you to make the various 10:45 a. m. works with the clock?

Ruhm: The clock appears at an airport in Truffaut's Day for Night. In the film, it's 10:45 in the morning. One of the main characters, Alexandre, is there to pick up a friend who, however, doesn't arrive. They don't meet. This circumstance interested me and induced me to make the image with the clock. In a new work, I put the same clock into motion again and made an animation out of it - an installation in which architectonic elements also play a role. The installation is reminiscent of an open-air movie theater, but also of a billboard. The clock is a model from the seventies in which the numbers appear on leaves that flap down from the top. In my animation, I record this movement of the flapping leaves - per minute and per hour - but the clock always shows the same time: 10:45 a. m. A double lie: Time passes that doesn't pass.

Lübbke: What role do the media you use play in regard to your artistic productions?

Ruhm: For me, it is not about thematizing the specific technology that I use. I work with technologies that are dependant on certain concepts of time and spatial ideas. I put these technologies into question by using them to investigate other systems of image production. It's not about the empty monitor screen, not the white screen, not interactivity - it's actually not at all about any of these paradigms. It's about a kind of narration that lacks any inherent story yet does speak about something, something that I myself must first learn to read. It's as if one was able to step into a single frame of a film which restores its own time, like the brown leather suitcase in Kiss me Deadly that stores the unknown content that leads to catastrophe at the end of the film.

from: CAMERA AUSTRIA 66/1999