In “Wachau” Manfred Neuwirth reframes a documentary on grape picking by taking from the original fifteen particular sequences which he converts to slow motion, and then rearranges them on a fourfold split screen in symmetrical order. Gradually, and clockwise from bottom left to bottom right, the takes fade in until they fully appear in all four partitions, before smoothly fading out in the same order of sequence.

It seems as if cinema opened its eyes, and one really saw film for the first time: the heavy hand on the wheel of a wooden barge, the man in the vineyard, the naked feet of a woman carrying a tub, an old pistol being fired, the stone gate on a hill that looks like a Spaghetti-Western set piece ... One is quite tempted to shout out to Neuwirth's sympathetic and congenial sound designer: Once Upon a Time in the West, Fennesz!

Michael Omasta