With his latest work, ‘magic hour’, film and media artist Manfred Neuwirth has completed his unique trilogy of interstitial spaces. The title of the trilogy refers to the Japanese concept of [ma] - the space between objects and activities. In Japan, this space is defined as ‘full of nothing’. The videos, reminiscent of diary entries, led Neuwirth from Tibet via Japan to Lower Austria. With the montage of surround sound original sounds and slow-motion images, he captures the personal and the everyday with rare poetry.

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Manfred Neuwirth's ‘Trilogy of Interstices’ finds a worthy conclusion with ‘Magic Hour’, after ‘Tibetan Recollections’ and ‘Manga Train’.

‘I know what's wrong with you: a man who doesn't tell you fairy tales...’ We hear the melody of an old pop song, played by an accordion, and see in close-up how the instrument is pulled together and then pulled apart again – but at a significantly slower pace, as if the image and sound do not quite want to go together. One of 54 self-contained shots that together form a cosmos of memory, a ‘Magic Hour’, as Manfred Neuwirth has called his new (video) film, in reference to that time between sunset and darkness when, as the great cameraman Nestor Almendros once said, ‘the light is truly magical for a few minutes because no one knows where it comes from’.

Neuwirth knows where it comes from. What it shows and makes audible comes exclusively from a few locations in his immediate home region of Lower Austria. He visits them as a documentarist who does not seek to nostalgically revive places from his own memory, but rather subjects them to a process of alienation: sound and image remain together in one shot and yet, in terms of their respective tempos, they diverge. In a simple way, a difference arises that literally removes what was once very private and very personal: what was close becomes distant and can thus be experienced anew in a dialectically dense play of rhythm and association.

In the process, Neuwirth repeatedly creates moments of enchanting beauty; for example, when fireworks rain down from the night sky with a roar, but very slowly: as if traces of light were running down a windowpane in slow motion. Incidentally, according to Neuwirth, it was indeed his intention to ‘catch’ the viewer with images from his or her own biography, despite the ‘fragmented’ nature of his cinematic approach, and to reach them ‘directly’. In my case, it worked very well.

When the camera glided over the stone pattern of the church square to be imagined, it was slowed down considerably to the sound of heavy pealing bells, the elements of the image came together in memory of family trips to the countryside in the seventies – a déjà vu that is due not least to that conscious abstraction, that specific exploration of the cinematic interstices that has made Neuwirth's works so extraordinary for years: they extend far beyond the merely individual, constantly placing it in relation to the larger social and also political (see, for example, the AIDS film ‘Vom Leben Lieben Sterben’) whole. In other words: a (video) cinema of the emancipated gaze, from the private to the general and back again.

Christian Cargnelli, Falter