Full moon in the Tibetan capital: Lhasa, 11.000 feet above sea level, seems to highlight its colours only during the night. Variegated floodlights tinge the waterspout fountains in front of the Potala Palace – and the water even seems to aim at the cold white moon high above. Light in toxic colours also flows and vibrates in the neon wires that decorate some otherwise nondescript house wall. Even the handrail of a bridge, irradiated in a sickly green, glows in bright yellow, while elsewhere red, green and purple are ceaselessly pumped through various LED chains. Manfred Neuwirth’s “Lunar Society“ is a little city symphony of only four minutes of length: a music video accompanying the song of the same name by Viennese band Modell Doo. The Lunar Society of Birmingham, founded in 1765, was a circle of scholars who only met at full moon to be able to get home afterwards with a little light in the streets. Quite in spirit with the intellectual lunarticks of the 18th century, “Lunar Society“ celebrates the various dances of light, water, and colour.

Neuwirth contrasts the caprices of the track, composed of electronic sizzles, sampled voices and fragments of piano, drum and choir music, with the visual stability of his high-definition images – and with intense colour play; he produces optical illusions and blurry contours, and after two and a half minutes of an almost imperceptibly slowed-down montage Neuwirth seems to arrive at a standstill – with a series of images in which only small isles of light continue to twitch and tremble. For his finale Neuwirth speeds up again, and returns to the fountains in front of the palace where the water is pushed into the black sky above Lhasa with unexpected violence. In the beginning of this film the evening traffic dashes in time-lapse photography past a main intersection; in the end night breaks in less than 25 seconds: From afar, from the banks of some lazy river, the camera gazes at a few lit apartment buildings on the periphery of the city. The moon has vanished.