Our Trip to Africa

Our Trip to Africa (1966)

Unsere Afrikareise

Originally commissioned by an Austrian couple in 1961 to photograph a travel diary documenting their wild game hunt, Kubelka shot three hours of film and recorded fourteen hours of audio. Over the next few years, Kubelka toiled in the editing bay, producing a work charged with intricate, ironic brutality.

Date of release
1966-10-14
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (45)
Runtime
13m
Director
Peter Kubelka

Interesting facts

Our Trip to Africa is a 1966 Austrian avant-garde short film by Peter Kubelka, originally commissioned as a travel diary documenting a wild game hunt. Kubelka used intricate editing strategies to produce a work about anti-colonialism.

Production

Kubelka was hired in 1961 by a couple from Wels, Austria, to document a hunting trip they were taking with three other people. The group traveled from Wels through Yugoslavia to Athens, Greece. From there, they took a ship to Cairo, Egypt and traveled up the Nile.

Over the course of the trip, Kubelka recorded three hours of film and fourteen hours of audio. He shot on Gevaert color positive stock. Since the film stock was sensitive to overexposure, he often intentionally underexposed it. Kubelka used simple compositions whose quick recognisability became useful as part of his elaborate editing strategies.

Once the group returned to Vienna, the couple who commissioned the film expected Kubelka would take four to six weeks to complete the film; however, the process ended up lasting five years. Kubelka produced what he described as a "vocabulary" from his recordings. Without money to create a workprint, he worked from a black-and-white negative.

Kubelka initially worked from an editing table belonging to a correspondent for a foreign news service. It became apparent to his financiers that the film he was making was radically different from the film they were expecting from him. In a compromise with their lawyers, Kubelka agreed to give them all material he did not use in his version. In 1964 Jerome Hill gave him a grant to go to the United States and spend two years working on the film.

Kubelka did not do any audio mixing on the film, so all of the sound on Our Trip to Africa was recorded live. He incorporated dialogue, music, and intermittent gunfire. He recorded live music as well as songs broadcast on the radio, with clips of contemporary pop songs, British dancehall music, Egyptian tango, and the score of Around the World in 80 Days.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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