Magic Hour

Restricted area in the middle of Lower Austria's Waldviertel region: Allensteig military training area: on the map, a patch mostly shaded in red. The little-known history of this landscape of ruins begins in 1938, when, in the wake of the annexation by Hitler's Germany, the area was declared a military training ground. As a result, more than 40 villages were resettled between 1938 and 1942.

A personal audio-visual notebook from Tibet (1988-95). The everyday things, the breathtaking light, the enjoyment of the common, the second look, the love for the detail, memories.

Film ist. 1-6 is an avant-garde collage from Gustav Deutsch, using found footage from various scientific films to explore the properties, impact and nature of film.

The filmmakers seek out experts and amateurs in the field of the supernatural and ask them to explain the methods by which they make contact with the "cosmic information web". In their search for "units of sense" in the chaos, the researchers use, interestingly enough, those techniques which are presently central to popular culture - de-construction, sampling and scratching.

In Gustav Deutsch's most recent found footage work the masses "absorb" (Walter Benjamin), the artwork. Three historical camera pans across the streets and squares of Vienna, Surabaya, and Porto provide a starting point for reflection on the relationship of everyday stories and cinematic machinery.

In the year 2700, a comic book artist encounters a mysterious alien while seeking revenge against the pyromaniac who burned down her printing presses.

In "Wachau", Manfred Neuwirth reformulates a documentary film about the grape harvest by isolating 15 moments from the original, slowing them down extremely and arranging them strictly symmetrically on the screen in quadruplicate. One by one - bottom left, top left, top right, bottom right - the image gently fades in until it can briefly be seen in all four positions, then just as gently fades out again in the same order.

A volcano’s eruption in Iceland as both a familiar, and a dramatic event – a fascinosum of movements, colours, forms and sounds.

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.

Slow-mo video art piece shot in Japan.

Pictorial and acoustic notes from an extraordinary place on the coast of Northern Peru. Lobitos – an outpost with its particular share of history. It was controlled by British oil producers for most of the twentieth century, before being taken over by the Peruvian state in the late 1960s to set up a military base. After waves of dilapitation and revitalization it is today a surf spot, a fishing hamlet, a Potemkin village of sorts. All quite absurd, yet with a wealth of ambiences and pictorial sceneries. Incidentally, it was here that the first cinema in South America was opened, of which only a few remnants can be found on the ground next to the church.

Manfred Neuwirth’s Scapes and Elements presents the viewer with a series of five panoramas of nature – five prolonged glimpses of open landscapes. One sees, hears, thinks: Neuwirth’s standards are rigorous, paying close attention to the precision of composition and timing.