Manfred Neuwirth's ‘Trilogy of Interstices’ creates space for seeing and hearing because it does not glue eyes and ears with explanations. A short fade-out, a short fade-in: a black frame, each one second long, sets the individual shots against each other. The analogy to a ‘photo album’ is deliberate: Just as the individual pictures usually all have the same format, here the duration of the shots always remains the same. Eight seconds of film, reproduced in five instances of slow motion – the sound runs asynchronously at normal recording speed. Seeing and hearing are two different things; ‘interstitial spaces’ open up between the visual and acoustic levels, and each requires undivided attention.

Manfred Neuwirth's ‘Trilogy of Interstitial Spaces’ consists of three medium-length films that the Lower Austrian filmmaker shot in Tibet, Japan, and the Waldviertel region of Austria and designed as described above: ‘Tibetan Recollections’ (1988-95), ‘manga train’ (1998), and ‘magic hour’ (1997-99). And like every good concept, this one also only emerged in the working process, specifically: during the editing, in the attempt to aesthetically organise the 30 hours of material that Neuwirth shot during the course of several trips to Tibet. The first shot of this first film is (explicitly) political in content: one sees Tibetan monks being arrested by Chinese police. After that, the film turns to everyday life in Tibet, a culture in transition, which, through the strength of its tradition, insists on its independence. ‘The resistance,’ as film critic Constantin Wulff noted, ‘is, as it were, incorporated into the cinematic material.’

The same could be said for all three films: they are about the “special in the incidental,” the acute beauty and immediate worldliness of the everyday. Neuwirth's works elude any form of commercialisation, in that they undermine the expectations of art film fuzzies at least as much as the claims of the often-invoked genre of the ‘travel film’. Going somewhere and ‘explaining to home what I've seen and what's going on there’ is not his thing, according to the filmmaker: ‘The more I travel, the less I can actually say about other countries.’ If anything, it's the other way around: he makes films in which faraway places seem close and nearby places seem far away – films about ‘being there, no matter where I am’.

Nothing is explained. The images and sounds stand, seemingly incoherent, for themselves. In ‘Tibetan Recollections’: A Buddhist monk looks into the camera – a motorbike rides down a street – a bottle of beer sits on a table. In ‘manga train’, a view of the half-weathered mud wall in a rock garden – the opening ceremony of a Sumo wrestling match – a family on the beach – the falling of freshly cut leaves in a park. In ‘magic hour’: lightning flashing in the dark night - a child's feet dipping into the water of a lavoir - the stone floor in front of a church - a stage, dry ice fog billowing up, while someone does their best to sing an Abba song.

Instead of Godard's ‘One Plus One’, Neuwirth uses ‘One to the Power of One’: the images are only localised through the sound, from which the rhythm of the films is then determined, the constant change between loud and quiet, speech and noise, silence and music - or, in relation to the trilogy, between picture puzzles and childhood memories, between Tokyo and Kritzendorf.

Michael Omasta