Hello,

travelling is a well-known process which seems nowadays overworked and not associated to a modern way to use a camera; but whatever era you are, in the hands of a great director, this technique can have a spectacular effect. In those cases, travelling is maybe the most emblematic and specific way proper to the cinema.
     I would like to speak about two wonderful examples; the first one comes from Jean Renoir's La chienne produced in 1931. This movie is one of the harsher of the expressionist movement, in the same "family" i would put Der blaue angel (von Sternberg), M le maudit (Lang) or Panique (Duvivier). At the end of the movie, when Michel Simon discovers that he is betrayed by Janie Marese, a slow travelling from outside sweeps across the flat where drama is going to happen. What a paradox! Renoir managed to freeze time and space with a movement of camera! The result is a fantastic climax where deleterious atmosphere of the movie comes to his peak. At the beginning of his film, the french director draws the curtain as if we were at theatre; this "mise en abyme" (i don't know the english term) doesn't make a distance, on the contrary, he opens the window of our soul and shows us our badest and darkest feelings. Here we can understand why some commentators compare Renoir with french writers of the end of XIXe century like Zola or Maupassant.
     My second examples is the famous running of Antoine Doinel in Les 400 coups by François Truffaut. Antoine just escaped from a prison for minors and runs toward the see. The camera follows him quickly and closely for a long time whereas he was before trailed along anywhere and always excluded of  the shot. Moreover, it's a rare moment without music in the picture that makes this scene very intense; here we feel fatherly love of truffaut for his character and the kid's craving for liberty.
     I am just thinking that those two travellings take place at the end of the movies in a powerful denouement... like in The good, the bad and the ugly by Sergio Leone and his incredible duel with three guys. I hope you will be interested by this subject and you will make me discover other beautiful examples.