In his experimental documentary From a nearby country Manfred Neuwirth explores a piece of Lower Austria / a piece of home

In the heat of summer, a few sheep seek the shade under a tree. A Catholic field mass takes place in the middle of the riparian forest. Hay bales wrapped in plastic are stacked in a harvested field. An elderly man is cutting the branches of a towering conifer while standing on a rickety ladder. At the Heurigen, a traditional Austrian wine tavern, they have prepared for the rush of guests, a row of polished tables stands in the gravel-strewn garden. In the evening, the sheep and lambs crowd into the barn, bleating loudly.

Seldom before has Manfred Neuwirth ventured so close to the places, sounds and tastes of his homeland as in his new work. Filmed in 2013/14, From a nearby country is set in the area around Kritzendorf, a small community on the Danube not far from Vienna. The Vitovec family, who make a living from viticulture, are among the filmmaker's long-established neighbours. The film has no dramaturgy in the classical sense, and therefore no centre, but it returns again and again to this family and their agriculture. We see the men in the vineyard, hammering in stakes for new rows of vines with the greatest of difficulty, how they later prune the vines and finally during the harvest and the bottling of the wine; we see the women tying the harvest crown and preparing a buffet for the wine tavern. Hard work, each and every one. With a slight squeaking, two suckling pigs slowly rotate on a double grill.

Neuwirth says he has been thinking about filming in his own immediate surroundings for a long time. ‘I have done quite a few projects that were created far, far away, but now it was a matter close to my heart to confront my immediate surroundings again. In this respect, the experiences I can have at work make no difference to me, whether I'm shooting in Japan or Tibet or, as now, on my doorstep in Lower Austria.’

Neuwirth's attempt to see the familiar with the greatest possible distance in order to become aware of the special in the everyday is From a nearby country. The film's very first image – sheep, a hill, glaring sun, a solitary tree – is puzzling. Where might this country be? In Greece? Italy? For the filmmaker, exploring his native terrain is always most exciting when it ‘reveals itself to him anew’. Of course, the beautiful images that Neuwirth finds are never an end in themselves; they also do not show untouched nature, but what people do to the land – and what the land does to people. The process-related – the physical work as well as the changing seasons – is clearly inscribed in his film.

As physical as his cinema is, Manfred Neuwirth is also concerned with an individual formal language. Thus From a nearby country marks both a continuation and a further development of the form that the filmmaker found for himself with his Tibetan Recollections (completed in 1995) and has since continued to refine, including with manga train (1998) and magic hour (1999), which were later published together and received a great deal of international attention as the [ma]-trilogy.

Each of the 24 shots in this new experimental documentary film lasts three minutes and is clearly distinguished from the next by black leader. The image is slowed down by a factor of two and a half; the sound, recorded at the same place and time, touches on what is shown without duplicating it, and expands it to include off-screen events. This deliberate ‘discrepancy’ between image and sound, which is central to his cinematic work, offers viewers ‘a good opportunity to see and hear differently’ (Neuwirth). For many years, the filmmaker has been working with sound designer and electronic sound artist Christian Fennesz on the soundtrack. Fennesz has added his own music to the four most abstract shots in the new film – a cornfield, stacked logs, a snow-covered forest path, and dense riparian forest with the sun glinting through the trees – to create a unique soundscape.

In his uncompromising work with image and sound, Neuwirth leaves both ethnographic cinema and the work of American filmmaker James Benning, for example – who is often compared to, if not named as a role model of – behind her. And as tightly as Neuwirth conceives her films, the freedom that one later enjoys while watching, seeing, listening and associating is just as great. We learn to experience the world anew through the filmmaker. This is due not least to his concept of cinematic craftsmanship. For Neuwirth, who, incidentally, has a perfect command of both, it is not the mastery of the camera or the editing that is really crucial, but rather his artistic credo, which he defines as a ‘life principle’: he simply allows himself ’ a lot of shooting time, my own pace and all artistic freedoms’ to slowly get on the trail of topics, to establish a sense of trust between the filmed and the filming subject, to observe things, and to collect and edit images and sounds.

The enormous calm and dogged concentration with which the filmmaker pursues his larger experimental projects is demonstrated by the prehistory of From a nearby country. It goes back to 2007/08, when Neuwirth created the photo series Territory, which was a kind of preliminary study for this film. Perhaps it was precisely his work with the motionless stills that prompted him to use a moving camera throughout a film for the first time: it passes through each of the 24 shots, moving slowly along the floor, just above it, to the left and then back to the starting point. At first, we are hardly aware of this uniform flow, but the effect is all the more surprising: as our point of view shifts, the spatiality of the images also changes, making them appear three-dimensional.

Familiar terrain, as if From a nearby country, but some images seem so unreal that one might think one were watching a science fiction film. In one picture, a huge tractor appears out of nowhere next to a field of hay; in another, a ship crosses the background of the picture, looking as if it is cutting right through the landscape. And sometimes it is the camera itself that causes the most delightful confusion: someone looks accurately into the picture, whispers with the person sitting next to them during the Sunday sermon or suddenly changes direction abruptly while walking, seemingly without reason.

Michael Omasta