Tibetan Recollections, manga train, magic hour

A Buddhist monk looks into the camera. A motorcycle drives down the street. A bottle of beer rests on a table. In tibetische erinnerungen, the most varied Images are arranged in a seem-ingly random order. Every shot is separated from the next by means of a fade. Manfred Neuwirth leaves it up to the viewer to create connections, very much refusing to weight the Images differently. The 35 shots are all of the same length, and each of them seems to have been slowed down. The director lends only the first shot any special meaning in that he introduces his film with it as a prologue: it shows Chinese soldiers forcibly arresting Tibetan monks. This political suppression forms the film's prevailing tone, and is recalled by some of the subsequent shots like an echo. When a uniformed woman sings a soppy pop song on television, for example, her clothes resemble those of the soldiers. The scene thereby visualizes the cultural suppression of the Tibetan people, a suppression to which Manfred Neuwirth's aesthetic offers resistance. In the slow-motion footage, the pop singer's lip-synching takes on a grotesque effect. Towards this end, the sound is asynchronous with the slowed-down image. With this division, the film-maker deconstructs the harmony that's being praised in song. Yet Neuwirth's travel Journal, shot between 1988 and 1995, does not allow itself to be reduced to the merely political level: the seemingly incidental is every bit as important to this film.

Elias Schafroth

With Manfred Neuwirth, there is this perpetual quest for the moment when reality makes its entrance, suddenly responds to his aesthetic and emotional expectations. There is in fact a poetical dimension to discover in each of the thirty shots that make up manga train. Identical in duration, the shots are interspersed with fades to black, requiring an incessant repetition of the to and fro between self and elsewhere. Here, the else-where is Japan. The film-maker shows us fragments of Japan, views of trains, of restaurants, of museums, manga train or the traveller's notebook. Each slow-motion picture is accompanied by a sound track whose evocative power appeals to our imagination. For Manfred Neuwirth is once again aspiring to represent a world in a few frames, a few gestures: a fishmonger lifting a crab out of an aquarium, in the night a flag moving with the wind, unveiling a street. About this street we will learn nothing, yet its signs unmistakably evoke the Sinjuku district of Tokyo. In this way he always captures the detail in such a way as to both reveal and conceal the universe he is exploring. Instead of following the path of faithful reproduction, meticulous and photographic, he offers a fragile interpretation which stimulates our own fantasy. As this story without words unfolds - the second part of the trilogy presented in Nyon this year - the formal process acquires all its maturity and the viewer can let himself drift into a dream of modern Japan.

Yann-Olivier Wicht

For the third part of his trilogy, after the films on Tibet and Japan, Manfred Neuwirth turned his camera on realities much closer to home: Lower Austria, where he grew up and still lives today. The gaze is the same: an unwavering interrogation of the details of everyday life, from a bottle of beer on a picnic table to slowly drifting clouds. The goal: to restore a freshness of vision to sights usually blurred by habit. Seen through the grille of a wire-mesh fence, a distant football match seems mysterious. And in close-up, the folds of an accordion take on almost abstract pro-portions.

Like the other films in the trilogy, magic hour consists of a series of shots of equal length, slowed down to one-fifth their normal speed and separated by fades to black. Surround sound often provides a counterpoint to the images. Neuwirth combines the precision of structural film with the lyricism of the video diary. Seen in slow motion, small gestures reveal a pathos that would escape our notice at normal speed. Neuwirth seems fascinated with capturing temporary phenomena: fireworks, flashing lights, the sound of dripping water and the radio of passing cars. In cinematography, the "magic hour" refers to the special quality of light shortly before sunset. An ephemeral intersection of two elements of physics: time and optics. This intersection is explored over and over in magic hour: like the church bells that ring off screen as the camera follows the pattern of paving stones.

Marcy Goldberg