Constanze Ruhm (born 1965) is an Austrian filmmaker, screenwriter, artist, author, professor, and curator. Her works include films, videos, installations, photographs, texts, and digital projects. She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 1996, she has been teaching internationally as a professor of film and video art. In 2006, she became a tenured professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Ruhm lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

Education

Ruhm began studying visual media design with Peter Weibel at the Academy of Applied Arts in 1987. In the early 1990s, she moved with Weibel to the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she became increasingly exposed to film and media theory discourses from Germany and France. During this time, she worked as a research assistant for artists such as Dara Birnbaum and Matt Mullican. She received her diploma from the Academy of Applied Arts in 1993, while continuing to work at the Städelschule until 1994.

Career

Ruhm spent the year of 1995-96 working on projects in New York. In 1996/97, Ruhm was a visiting professor for visual media at the Offenbach am Main College of Design. In 1998, she received the Schindler Scholarship from the Museum of Applied Arts and as a result spent a year as artist-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2001, she was Vice President of the Vienna Secession. From 2000 to 2003, Ruhm worked at the in Stuttgart, curating projects with Fareed Armaly.

In 2005/2006, she was appointed professor of film and video at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Since 2006, she has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in the Department of Art and Digital Media. From 2007 to 2011, alongside her work in Vienna, she was an adjunct professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2017, she founded the queer feminist concept choir Mala Sirena with musician Florian Paul Ebner. In 2023, the Austrian Film Museum dedicated a retrospective to Ruhm's film and video work.

Ruhm's style, technique and themes

In her artistic work, Ruhm explores film, other media, and archives, as well as feminist historiography.

She often accompanies her films with installations that expand on the films' ideas, themes and references.

Early digital work

Ruhm's initial work was in digital art: at the time she was working with Weibel, Birnbaum and Mullican—creating 3D environments for the latter—it was a field that "appeared unbelievably promising and exciting." The culmination of this period in her work was her collaboration with on an installation for the Venice Biennale of 1995. But shortly after this project, her interest in narrative cinema came to the fore, though still filtered through her background in digital art, as she reworked and re-envisioned the presuppositions of the earlier form by means of the new medium.

"Since the late 1990s, [Ruhm's] work has been characterized mainly by references to certain films." Apartment (1998), while still a digital piece, explicitly evokes a classic film of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le mépris), foregrounding "the representation of female characters within the cosmology of this male-dominated auteur cinema." In Ruhm's reworking of the breakup between the characters played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli,

A move to working with actors and scripted features; the "seven characters"

In 2001, Ruhm started the process of moving "to real, analogue space, to work with real people, with actors[...].". This provided a better match with her literary background: "[M]y works develop not least from a writing practice, from text, and through narrative storytelling, or rather through the script." But one last digital work, A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2002), named after a Joyce poem, served as a bridge between the digital period and the shift toward working with actors. Like Apartment, A Memory is built upon a digital reconstitution of a set from a narrative feature, in this case Irvin Kershner's Eyes of Laura Mars. But the narration of Ruhm's work is based on an assemblage of the dialogue of female characters from that film as well as from several other films—what Ruhm calls her "matrix films." In the decade to come, she will return regularly to these characters and films in her projects. In addition to the character of Laura Mars played by Faye Dunaway in Kershner's film, these characters include:

Nana, from Godard's Vivre sa vie (originally played by Anna Karina) Giuliana, from Antonioni's Red Desert (originally played by Monica Vitti) Alma, from Bergman's Persona (originally played by Bibi Andersson) Bree, from Alan J. Pakula's Klute (originally played by Jane Fonda) Hari, from Tarkovsky's Solaris (originally played by Natalya Bondarchuk) Rachel, from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (originally played by Sean Young)

A Memory exists both as a standalone 26-minute film and as an installation. In a review of the installation, Michael Hall noted that Ruhm "sifted through this popular suspense film and eliminated nearly all the pertinent information, except for the elements that most interested her[...] leaving an obscure digital picture that looked neither real nor fake." In this process of "emptying out" the original film, "Ruhm's main concern centers on how the space of cinematic narratives and the stories invented by others can add to the understanding of our own social reality."

X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003) was Ruhm's first film with on-screen actors. Here all seven of the characters appear in the flesh and interact with each other. Ruhm worked out the script in a collaborative process with seven friends, each focusing on one of the main roles. The film was shot in Berlin, with help from colleagues such as Harun Farocki, a fellow professor at the Academy in Vienna. In the film the seven characters,

Ruhm had originally planned on naming the series of films X Characters in Search of an Author, alluding to the Pirandello play. As for the "X" with which the titles of this film and the two next ones begin, normally it "is used in theater and film production to mark the position of an actor, and is applied with chalk or tape to a usually black-painted wooden floor. In her films, Constanze Ruhm turns the 'X' into a protagonist, into a transmitter between character and space."

X Characters is also her first film in which rehearsals play a key on-screen role. The exploration of the world of rehearsals—the postures, the gestures, the struggles, the shifts in identity—will become an integral part of nearly all of her films up to the present day. "The rehearsal as form and method forms the basis for most of my works."

X NaNa / Subroutine (2004), in which Farocki has a small role, was the first in an intended series of standalone films about each of the seven characters—thus a "subroutine" of the main "program" featuring all seven. X NaNa imagines Godard's Nana (who prefers spelling her name with two capital "N"s) working in a record shop while participating in hacking operations and interrogating her creator via an Internet chat screen. The soundtrack echoes her name through judicious selections from various pop songs.

Ultimately the only other film made in the series of standalone films was X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String (2007), centered on Giuliana. Here the "X", drawn on a piece of black cloth used in film shoots and called a "flag," figures physically and prominently as Giuliana, now an actress, not only plays herself but also Bree and Hari, "creating a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of identities." She is often obliged to act with the flag as her only partner (this is an evocation of a real film shoot during which Maureen O'Hara often had to perform love scenes alone with such a flag while her co-star Errol Flynn was too drunk to function). The director, also a woman, is a relatively overbearing, unfriendly presence, often criticizing Giuliana's acting. Only Nana, who has become a script supervisor in this film, tries to give Giuliana constructive advice.

Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot (2010) was the last of Ruhm's films to feature any of the seven characters. Here, those remaining are Hari, Nana, and Giuliana, who has become "Julian" and is played by a male actor (wearing a slip). Although it is not presented as such, the film could be seen as centered on Hari this time, as

The other characters therefore emulate Hari's behavior in Solaris where she attempts more than once to commit suicide but is unsuccessful, being a mere projection from the surface of the planet Solaris.

FilmNanaGiulianaAlmaBreeHariLaura MarsRachelA Memory of the Players in a Mirror at MidnightX Characters / RE(hers)ALX NaNa / SubroutineX Love Scenes / Pearls without a StringCrash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot—as "Julian"

Partnerships with co-directors Cold Rehearsal

The end of the period centered on the seven characters inaugurated a new one where Ruhm worked in collaboration with other directors. Again, a film bridges the divide between the two periods: in this case, it is Cold Rehearsal (Kalte Probe) (2011/12), co-directed by Christine Lang. The two main characters are Anna, clearly based on Anna Karina and as such a callback to Nana from the earlier films, and Hans, played by the same actor who played Julian in the previous film and evoking a name Godard used to pseudonymously sign several articles of film criticism.

The film begins, however, with three figures who Ruhm has identified as dead actresses formerly in Hans's films and marooned in a realm of detritus—a patch of land with folding chairs and a tent—that she calls "hell." But she has also said that the characters from the earlier series "find themselves together again," implying that the actresses are continuations or interpolations of the seven earlier characters. The actresses exact punishment on Hans by imagining him as a janitor on a talk show, made to appear on it as a guest with Anna (played by one of the dead actresses). Through a process of redoubling he is also forced to witness the events in the talk show studio with two other instances of Anna (played by the other two dead actresses) and himself (always himself, sometimes dirtier, sometimes stupider).

Other elements connect Cold Rehearsal to the earlier series: some of the actors (Judith van der Werff, Irina Kastrinidis, Dominic Oley); a sardine can; shovels for digging graves and knocking people unconscious; and the male character explaining that he is undergoing an identity crisis. "The film explores forms of female (self-)representation and the autonomy of female film characters as opposed to their male writers and directors." The dialogue in the film serves as "hidden instructions for the plot as well as its interpretation, thereby exposing the cinematic illusion -- in a very Brechtian sense -- by laying bare the modes of production." Ruhm has reiterated this lineage of her work: "By showing the contrived aspect of fiction, I am working in the Brechtian tradition, so to speak."

Panoramis Paramount Paranormal

Panoramis Paramount Paranormal (2014–16), co-directed by Emilien Awada, continues the connection with Godard and Karina. The film starts at Le Panoramis, an apartment complex in the Paris suburbs that was once the site of the , the French division of Paramount. Godard had shot scenes from A Woman Is a Woman at these studios. However, Ruhm saw this film as the beginning of a "new cycle" where "the form has become much more open and essayistic." Indeed, the film is less dominated by on-screen characters and features long passages of the surroundings of Le Panoramis with only ambient sound and the occasional passerby.