A slide film, a motion picture made up of still images: in his latest work, media artist Manfred Neuwirth revisits the once dreaded family slide show. But in this case, the tedium of the accompanying commentary by lecturing fathers is completely eliminated, as the pulse of the images is too fast: 40 images delicately fading into one another, jumping between landscape and portrait format in 60 seconds—that's too fast to really engage with the individual views. But it is slow enough to recognize the structures of “vacation viewing,” the systematics of family portraits (and, associated with this, certain worldviews).

Neuwirth strings together around 1,200 amateur photographs from the years 1960 to 1968 in 30 minutes to the gentle surf of a piece by composer Christian Fennesz (“In My Room”): Italian beach and Austrian cityscapes, often as panoramas, seen from high above; family members in everyday vacation life, playing, having fun, and spending time together; children, plants, architecture, forest and alpine scenery, living rooms and restaurants, parades, and a shiny red VW Beetle — and again and again: leisure time by the water, at the sea, lakes, rivers, and streams. The preservation of once memorable but long-forgotten moments has solidified into genre photography, sinking into the universal.

What appears anonymous is in fact very personal, because Neuwirth is showing private photographs here: they are his father's slides, which he salvaged after his parents' death. The find was rich: for 30 years, Erich Neuwirth had worked to document his travels and family vacations in a total of about 12,000 transparencies before he left the medium behind and switched to home video. Neuwirth has selected only works from the first eight years of this photographic career, in which he himself often appears as a child. He called his film “Vom Vater bleibt nur mehr der Rest im Bild” (Of the father, only a residue remains in the image), quoting one of the idiosyncratic titles his father gave his photos, which he left behind in typewritten lists.

Home movies, amateur films, and vacation films are a popular subject in the history of avant-garde cinema (see, for example, Gustav Deutsch's “Adria”), but Neuwirth approaches the theme with greater simplicity, without subjective intervention. Love is inherent in the concept of amateurism; one senses the dedication and care in the images unfurled here. (The latent bourgeoisie that one may discover in some of them also has to do with the fact that both parents were educators and taught at schools.) Many of the motifs seem classic amateur photography, and yet there is something eminently cinematic about the photographer's gaze, which is rooted in the image compositions and the bright colors; Fennesz's ominously menacing ambient music adds to this effect. In a way, Neuwirth's treatment of the slides left behind is also a tribute to his father's perspectives, which shaped his son and may even have unconsciously initiated his interest in media art.

Fireworks, summer heat, and sunsets: the light images appear and disappear again almost immediately, lasting barely longer than the blink of an eye, and are vaguely reminiscent of Chris Marker's famous cinematic dystopia “La jetée”: the fleeting nature of all the moments frozen in time that make up a life leaves a bitter yet sweet aftertaste.

Stefan Grissemann