The power of images
The cine camera must be one of the greatest inventions ever. When one thinks of the saying the camera never lies, one has to be careful because we live in times when cinematic and still photographic images can easily be amended to present fabrications of the truth, but there is no doubt that it makes an imaginative difference when we can see what person truly looks like at various stages of his or her development.
I saw some video footage recently of a much revered political leader in his younger years. For some reason, those images told me things about the person that I hadn’t thought of before.
Seeing the younger man stepping out of limousines and bounding down corridors of power gave me some feelings and thoughts about the reputation he built for himself and his legacy.
Was it possible that he was not really a visionary after all? Maybe he was simply a journeyman who had ambitions to become a statesman. He might have been endowed with some talents, but I didn’t get a feeling of transcendence from his aura.
We are all human, of course. Some people are gifted with the sort of charisma that comes across effectively on screen, which is why the star system was developed in the motion picture industry. Looking at the video footage made me think of this politician’s literary output as a thought leader also. His followers might refer to his writings to quote facts and figures, but his impact and contribution on a wider scale to the human race was probably modest in comparison to the efforts of his myth making machine.
Originally published on www.juwonogungbe.com on November 29th 2019
