Unfathomable
Videographer and Editor (2022)
Unfathomable is a 40 minute, art-as-research film adapted from the stage play by the same name. The stage play was devised by Athena Mazarakis and Alex Halligey, and first premiered live at the National Arts Festival Fringe in Makhanda in 2019, winning a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award.
Using water as a central motif-metaphor for processing grief, the original theatre work traces the histories of Halligey’s father and grandmother through a poetic play between materials, body and words. Curious to see how this theatrical audio-visual richnesss might be realised in the audio-visual medium of film, an ensemble of artists have collaborated to realise this new iteration of Unfathomable, funded through Halligey’s National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences postdoctoral research fellowship with the Johannesburg Institute for Advance Study at the University of Johannesburg and with technical and venue support from UJ Arts and Culture.
Halligey as performer, Mazarakis as director, Jenni-lee Crewe as designer, Benjamin Muir-Mills as lighting designer, Nicola Pilkington as videographer and editor, Zain Vally as sound designer and engineer and Daniel de Wet as original score composer have experimented towards creating a cinematic work that is neither a filming of the stage performance nor a translation of the stage performance into film, but rather the use of filmic elements (camera, editing, music composition and sound design for camera) in dialogue with set, stage lights, materials, live sound and performer to express Unfathomable’s theatrical imagery.
“Pilkington filmed the whole thing on an iPhone using a gimbal, “a light-weight responsive instrument that could gently glide and move with Alex around the space”, she explains. “Not only did this allow for the camera to easily experience the action from below, above, or alongside Alex; but it also got an intimate, almost textural experience of the movement and the objects.”
Importantly, these scenes manage to hold a lot of the immediacy and the presence of theatre. They feel alive and full of risk. There is the fear of falling or fumbling or forgetting one’s lines, one’s choreography on stage. In this way, there are the kinds of “live” moments that are inherent to theatre, but foreign to traditional film.”
- David Mann, Daily Maverick