Unsere Afrikareise (1961-1966)
Directed by Peter Kubelka
Genre: Anant-garde / Experimental Short
Runtime: 13 min
Country: Austria
Language: German
Color: Color
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376293/
Unsere Afrikareise:
Museum of Modern Art, 1967: "New Cinema - An International Selection" "UNSERE AFRIKAREISE is about the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen. I have seen it four times and I am going to see it many, many times more, and the more I see it, the more I see in it. Kubelka's film is one of cinema's few masterpieces and a work of such great perfection that it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one knew about cinema. The incredible artistry of this man, his incredible patience. (He worked on UNSERE AFRIKAREISE for five years; the film is 12 and a half minutes long.) His methods of working (he learned by heart 14 hours of tapes and three hours of film, frame by frame), and the beauty of his accomplishment makes the rest of us look like amateurs." - Jonas Mekas
1961-1966, 16mm, color/so, 12.5m
Peter Kubelka's harrowing masterpiece
This short experimental film ranks with Robert Bresson's 'Au hasard Balthazar' as one of the most important films ever made. I saw it once several years ago at a screening sponsored by the Austin Film Society, and I distinctly remember the emotions it roused not only in myself, but in my fellow audience members.
The film is comprised of footage that distinguished Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka shot while on safari in Africa. I understand that Kubelka had been commissioned by a travel agency to shoot this footage as promotional material, but what he ended up doing with it was far more subversive and harrowing than this purported genesis would suggest.
The film clinically and dispassionately records wealthy German-speaking tourists cheerfully engaged in shooting beautiful wild animals and implicitly lording it over the native people of the area they are in. The film thus becomes an indictment of an imperialist Western mentality that was clearly alive and well in the aftermath of colonialism, though this was not immediately clear to me when I first saw it. I could not get past the shock of seeing the nonchalant and callous way these people were killing these animals, and my distate was clearly shared by other members of the audience I was in.
It was only after some reflection that it occurred to me that Kubelka's stance here was subversive, that he was both recording factual events and challenging the viewer to engage with this record on a variety of levels, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically. That the film is an aesthetic provocation as much as an emotional one is evidenced by the elliptical, staccato style in which Kubelka edits the visual and aural components of his film. The viewer barely has time to register one image before another comes into view, and the soundtrack is likewise composed of brief, terse snatches of sound. The overall effect is one of dislocation and bewilderment, heightened by the highly charged emotional character of the footage one is confronted with.
It took time for me to recognize the importance of Kubelka's achievement here. I realize now that some very profound ideas and associations are being propounded in this great film, and that it is a powerful expression of a highly intelligent artistic mind.
Afrikareise-Peter_Kubelka.wmv 
(2-3 full sources now)
