Peter Kubelka Overview

It is the sensory impression of a moment -- its sight, sound, and smell -- that most deeply embeds itself in our memories and our internal histories, and it is such impressions that Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka seeks to capture in... [more]

It is the sensory impression of a moment -- its sight, sound, and smell -- that most deeply embeds itself in our memories and our internal histories, and it is such impressions that Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka seeks to capture in his short works. Quantitatively, the entire collection of his short films would not take up more than an hour. Qualitatively, his concentrated, abstract snapshots on film, which foresaw the Structuralist style of filmmaking, are packed with evocative pieces of sound and image that overlap and propel one another. Kubelka's short works helped characterize and define the European and experimental underground cinema of the 1960s. His ironic travelogue "Our Trip to Africa" (1966) is a montage of sights -- hunters, natives, animals, and buildings -- accompanied by effusions of sound. Kubelka studied in Vienna and Rome, and made his first film, "Mosaik im Vertrauen" in 1955. He went on to invent the "metric film" technique, which reduced images to abstract, black-and-white frames, and to develop "sound film," a form of visual and auditory landscape whose rhythm lingers on in the subconscious long after the screen has dimmed. [show less]