Our Trip to Africa

This avant-garde classic about an African safari in the 1960s is striking thanks to the rhythmic editing of sound and images, for which Peter Kubelka would become famous. In 1961, Kubelka was asked to make a documentary about a group of Europeans on safari in Africa. He then spent five years editing the huge amount of material he had accumulated. The result, , makes exceptional use of the possibilities of sound. Kubelka based his sound edit on the idea that appropriate sound adds little to the image. Kubelka preferred to match the image to a completely different sound, preferably one recorded on location somewhere else. The resulting combinations of sound and image - referred to by Kubelka as "sync events" - are often exactly matched in terms of timing and rhythm. For example, images of zebras and giraffes that have been shot contrast with the chatter of the European tourists. A white man shaking hands with an African is accompanied by the sound of thunder. The leg of a freshly killed zebra shakes the same way as the hand of the amicable tourist. In the final analysis, Kubelka does not show a literal connection between the hunter and the hunted, but reveals a deeper causal relationship.