Manfred Neuwirth uses very similar methods of representation in his 1988 film Erinnerungen an ein verlorenes Land (Memories of a Lost Land), in which the filmmaker also ventures into forgotten areas and looks back at the history of dispossession: where the Allensteig military training area is located today, in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, there were once over forty villages before 1938. The National Socialists 'desettled' all these villages in order to gain a military training area, dissolved them and made people homeless. Neuwirth traces the history of this region and its people, visits a resettlers' meeting in the early summer of 1988 and lets the former inhabitants of the villages tell their stories in front of the camera: Stories about the close connection between landscape, politics and individual tragedy.

Even if the last two documents mentioned blur the dividing line to cinema and do not work so much in a media-specific way, the aesthetic that video art has generated in a thousand mutations since the seventies is a very special, unmistakable one. Video is art for the monitor, not television and not film, not quite a museum piece and not quite an everyday object. Video operates between the locations and the broadcasting sites, on the fine line between a quick pamphlet and museum quality. The medium capitalises on this quality, which is unique in the history of audiovisual art. The consistent erosion of boundaries and categorisations continues in the tapes, in the concrete video work. Narration and depiction, fiction and fact, avant-garde and document often flow into one another, eliminating the dividing lines between the sectors.

Manfred Neuwirth's Tibetische Erinnerungen (1995) and manga train (1998), the Japanese sequel, are just two recent - and extraordinarily beautiful, sensual - examples of the gentle fusion of the documentary and the staged; melancholic series of concise, precisely selected travel memories, set in slow motion and thus alienated from everyday life. Neuwirth penetrates the depths of the images, as it were, by looking at them both penetratingly and tenderly: The lyrical reworking turns reality into memory, the objective becomes strictly subjective. The fact that the most interesting 'documentary' video tapes in particular are often the result of meticulous post-production (selecting sections, changing speeds, removing 'realism' values) effectively invalidates the old argument and prejudice of the snapshot character that is supposedly inherent in video art.

Stefan Grissemann, Blimp 39