Browsing by Author "Du Preez, Angela Jane"

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    The other animal : poems
    (1999) Du Preez, Angela Jane
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    The other animal : poems
    (1999) Du Preez, Angela Jane
    Overheard one night was part of a television documentary which chronicled the making of a showcase on the African elephant. The rigours involved in filming such unpredictable subjects featured strongly in the interviews with each member of the film crew : the length of time required to develop a relationship of trust with the animals, the ever-present variable of the weather, and, most generally, the fact that the animals never performed on cue. The cameraman was heard at one stage to elaborate upon the frustrations of the latter : when, on one occasion, a perfect shot presented itself (a brooding early morning sky, the emergence and proximity of a family unit with several calves, the elephants' permitting the crew to approach the waterhole), there was a glitch in the process of loading the awkward and oversized Imax camera with its roll of film. The herd, sensing the cameraman's growing anger as he battled with the machine, moved away. His natural response was to lament missing the shot. Being passionate about his work, the setback disappointed him. The camera not filming, he viewed an instant that was truly representative of his subjects' nature, embodying, through their acceptance of the film crew and complete lack of fear for the safety of the calves, the very sense of the elephants' human family dynamics around which his documentary centred. He felt that his inability to present filmed evidence in some way diminished the moment, its inherent quality. He held in his heart a moment, an image, the significance of which he could not testify to on his return from the assignment. Many other shots were captured and the documentary completed satisfactorily, but the project took on, in the cameraman's mind, the opposite effect. Instead of bearing witness to the nature of his subject, bringing closure, testifying to its existence and a man's presence inside its world, instead of being an edifice of some kind built in the likeness of an experience, the assignment revealed to the cameraman an unmediated representative image of the animals and, importantly, the extent to which he and his documentary failed in their attempt to render this. He returned to the editing studio with miles of footage but less than that with which he left : the sense of what remains unarticulated about the world he had made it his life to render cinematically.