In this paper, I will try to compare two films, which are “Our Trip to Africa” directed by Peter Kubelka and “Puce Moment” directed by Kenneth Anger. After giving the story of the films, I will try to compare their soundtracks of which produce significant portions of their meanings.
Peter Kubelka’s 1966 film “Our Trip to Africa” is a remarkably unique bit of filmmaking. It is a very simplistic in its premise: a group of white Europeans go on a hunting trip in Africa: having fun, shooting wildlife, and interacting with the natives. However, one might already tell that this is not so simple, as the thought of these middle-class whites coming into contact with the indigenous blacks immediately stirs up an entire spectrum of emotion and phrases. In the article “Sound and Silence in Narrative and Non-Narrative Film” written by Fred Camper, Camper mentions that Kubelka’s technique is to marry “an image with a sound that derives from elsewhere”. In the film, Kubelka has employed a classic sound tactic: the laugh track. Not in a conventional sense, though. Kubelka’s laugh track is a much more realistically captured one, using one particularly raucous instance of guffawing, one the part of his European subjects, multiple times throughout the film. However, we do not see specifically where this laughter comes from, or if it is just one track of sound or even several loops of laughter played over each other; all we know is that at some point or points on this trip our Europeans were having a chuckle and Kubelka recorded it for use in this film. The track is played several times throughout the film, the most notable being in a depiction of the native people’s everyday lifeKubelka, in his use of quick, timeless cuts and a carefully used “laugh track”, very neatly does away with our preconceived notions of either the native Africans or the European bourgeoisie interlopers and then promptly uses that momentary objectivity to see the hunters and their posse as he saw them. It is, in this aspect, a very effective piece of persuasive filmmaking that utilizes both sight and sound in unconventional yet effective ways.
By contrast, Kenneth Anger in Puce Moment concentrates on another aspect of sound. Puce Moment is a short 6-minute film. This film opens with a camera watching 1920’s style flapper gowns being taken off a dress rack. The dresses are removed and danced off the rack to music. A long-lashed woman dresses in the purple puce gown and walks to her vanity to apply perfume. She lies on a chaise lounge, which leads her begin to move around the room and eventually out to a patio. In the article “Working in Light: Kenneth Anger” written by William Wees, he thinks the woman wears the dress is to “enjoy a ‘transporting’ experience” because as the pop songs on the soundtrack clearly announce: “my mind will listen to the stars… my mind is in the air. Yes, I am a hermit. My mind is not the same. Yes, I am a hermit, and ecstasy in my game.” Which proved that why the woman laughs ecstatically when she put her dress on at the beginning of the film. The soundtrack, which was added in the film, improved the main theme nicely.
In conclusion, both of the films are aimed to emphasize the meaning of their films throughout soundtracks. Nevertheless, in “Our Trip to Africa”, Kubelka tried to unite rhythmically as closely as lips and sound do in lip-sync. His technique allows the audience believes the sound in his film is in fact synchronous because his sound and image are perfectly matched. However, in “Puce Moment”, Anger did not focus on the synchronous sound. He tried to focus on the lyrics in the soundtrack to further suggest that the dresses are “’talismans’ of ’preternatural light’”.