Kritzendorf: wine-makers in experimental film

Filmmaker Manfred Neuwirth has examined his neighbourhood and shows the work of vintners: with slow images in a fast time. In the beginning, there are the sheep. They crowd around a picturesque tree, above which is a bright blue sky. You can hear bleating. Individual animals slowly separate from the flock. At some point, you notice a shadow moving over the back of an animal.

The scene is one of the most varied in the film. At other points, things are even quieter. Farmers cut branches in the vineyard, a priest preaches at a field mass, two suckling pigs turn on the spit. Or just: a woodpile, where the camera moves slowly, very slowly, past.

Manfred Neuwirth says that he started his work with photos and sound, that he often does it this way, simply digging into it with ‘optical and acoustic notes’ so that a system slowly emerges from them: three-minute-long images scanned from left to right. A rhythm in which you can ‘flip through the images as if you were leafing through an album’.

‘From a nearby country’ is the name of the experimental film in which the well-travelled filmmaker has taken on his immediate surroundings. Firstly, because he is interested in “territories”: “small areas in which I can move and where optical and acoustic stimuli affect me.” This is what he does when he works in Japan or Tibet. And also in his home village of Kritzendorf. There, and this is the second aspect that moved him, there is only one full-time farmer left in his neighbourhood. Using his example, he wants to show ‘what is hardly seen anymore today: what hard rural work means.’ With their large wine tavern, the Vitovec family also form the local centre of communication. Of course, says Neuwirth with a grin, he had to do hard research work there.

‘Yearning for concentration’

The effort paid off: the film has just won the Diagonale award for best image design and best sound design in the documentary category. Here, it is above all the interplay between the two that achieves the desired effect: If you decouple image and sound, Neuwirth believes you can ‘bring the viewer into a special perceptual situation’. Not pedagogically, ‘but sensually’: he detects, he says, a yearning for images that you can concentrate on, ‘and not just assault-like cinema that smothers you with sound and image effects’. A kind of cinematic version of what he had recently observed at the Velazquez exhibition: ‘An insane bustle, and yet there were people who were totally absorbed in the picture. I myself have such moments when I am in the cinema as a spectator, and I want to create them myself, so that there can be such concentrated looking and listening.’

Neuwirth, who grew up in the Weinviertel region and in Bad Vöslau, has been familiar with winemaking since childhood. His father, who started using video at an early stage, passed his love of the camera on to him. His love of faraway places was sparked by his grandfather, a retired teacher who took his English-speaking grandson with him on trips at an early age. At 18, Neuwirth came to India. ‘I can't even begin to describe how it affected me, seeing starving people for the first time.’

Later, he used video to support the concerns of his generation: the anti-nuclear movement, equality, the gay initiative, the Arena. ‘Media social workers’ is how Neuwirth describes them. He still works in the media workshop on Neubaugasse that was set up at the time. Social issues continue to appear in his work to this day. In 2013, he made a sequel to “Vom Leben Lieben Sterben”, a documentary that shed light on experiences with AIDS in the early nineties. Dying per se is not a major film topic for him, even though he has encountered it in many different ways: in Tibet, for example, he says, where people practice dying while they are still alive. ‘Through my travels, I have gained a completely different perspective on how to deal with it.’

Teresa Schaur-Wünsch, Die Presse