Manfred Neuwirth began working with moving images in the 1970s and has since then continuously presented an engaged, documentary oeuvre of integrity in video works, films, multimedia installations and interactive image systems. He is also one of the singularly important persons in the development and continuation of independent political media work in Austria. (He is a founding member and still an active contributor to Medienwerkstatt).

Despite these years of professional practice, his works do not look like routine or routine commitment. Each new work means a new search for an adequate (visual) form and a new way of attempting (film) statements about a problem or situation that is close to him. A specific formal grammar is developed in each film.

Manfred Neuwirth's films are always also precise experimental setups for the attempt to find images that prompt seeing. This is perhaps especially clear in his most recent film work to date, ‘Tibetan Recollections’ (1995), (but this formally innovative strategy can also be found in his earlier films): ‘Tibetan Recollections’ consists of 35 shots of everyday life in a foreign country. All the shots are the same length, the images are slowed down to slow motion, the sounds are asynchronous and at normal hearing frequencies. These are 35 (film) glances that, beyond tourist curiosity, maintain the distance (and respect) towards the foreign. But they are also glances that invite you to look, because they are neither voyeuristic nor looking for the spectacular, but rest on faces, gestures, everyday objects, posters and prayer flags. The strict structuring between viewing and listening time creates a space (enabling a second glance), in which the concentration and questions of the audience can be fixed. No gaze is a finished statement, but only a detail of a time segment that has been taken out of everyday life, defined by a stopwatch, but nevertheless completely open in its duration. The film begins with a short prologue, a sequence of the violent arrest of Tibetan monks by Chinese police. The film does not argue or explain anything else, but shows these images of people and a culture in transition, which gently, almost lovingly, become a testimony to an independent, happy life. (The resistance is, so to speak, incorporated into the cinematic material - Constantin Wulff).

This reference to real life, to the details of the ordinary (which are actually what constitutes the political), also characterises the other documentary films by Manfred Neuwirth. There is neither polemic nor agitation in the choice of images or editing, but rather an intensive circling around a subject through long conversations from many perspectives and in unusually precisely chosen framings. The film on the subject of AIDS, for example, ‘Vom Leben Lieben Sterben - Erfahrungen mit AIDS’ (1992/93) talks about an almost ‘normal’ way of dealing with the disease, which takes it out of the media noise and back into everyday life. And in addition to the (ethical) rules of ‘oral history’, there are always purely formal pictorial decisions that open up space for the audience to see and think. The film about the military training area at Allentsteig, ‘Erinnerungen an ein verlorenes Land’ (1988), fills the blank space on the map of Lower Austria with a diversity of voices telling life stories that speak so matter-of-factly of loss and survival strategies that an extraordinarily complex spectrum emerges for one's own ‘perspective’ and opinion-forming. Many people in the region have been able to see this film. And they not only experienced a knowledgeable reappraisal of a political scandal, but were also able to listen calmly, weigh up and compare. There is space for the viewers' thought processes in the film images. The images are open, undogmatic. The filmmaker acknowledges those he talks to (and is acknowledged by them), and he respects his audience.

Manfred Neuwirth chose the following keywords to characterise the production of ‘Tibetan Memories’: ‘everyday life, the incredible light, the joy of the ordinary, the second glance, the love of detail, memories.’ These terms can also be used to describe his other works. The second glance also means the conscious, self-reflective intervention of the camera, of the film-maker, who, through his way of seeing, does not attempt to duplicate reality but to present it.

Birgit Flos, Catalogue of the Cultural Prize Winners of the State of Lower Austria 1997