- Title
- A 'headless statue' and 'A headless Ghana' – a case study on the role of signs and symbols in creating factual stories
- Creator
- Jansen van Vuuren, Anna-Marie
- Subject
- Accra (Ghana) - Politics and government, Nkrumah, Kwame, 1909-1972
- Date
- 2016
- Type
- Conference proceedings
- Identifier
- http://ujcontent.uj.ac.za8080/10210/383554
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/217755
- Identifier
- uj:21679
- Identifier
- Citation: Jansen van Vuuren, A.M. 2016. A headless statue' and 'A headless Ghana' – a case study on the role of signs and symbols in creating factual stories.
- Description
- Abstract: “The headless statue of Nkrumah symbolises that we have become a headless Ghana.” These words of a Ghanaian politician became the starting point for a short documentary that explored the mythical image of the first leader of the independent Ghana. However, what began as a few interviews with political members, resulted in much more – as the filmmakers followed the visual signs of this icon all over the city of Accra – and ended up finding an interesting tale about how people reacted to these visuals, and the message one could read between the lines of their words. In visual storytelling, whether it be producing documentaries or television news inserts, we tend to think of the story first and the pictures thereafter. However, the author of this paper found in directing and producing the short documentary “Finding Nkrumah” that sometimes following the visuals will dictate its own angle and create its own story. Furthermore, the author also found that certain visual images (or “signs”) would get the documentary participants/interviewees as well as the viewers to respond to the story in interesting ways by attributing their own symbolism to it. According to many scholars, that is part of the power of the visual image, as Browne (1983:vi) states “Pictures ... are exceptionally effective because, although words lie flat and dormant to some readers, it is difficult to miss messages carried in a motion picture.” Unfortunately, journalists or producers at times tend to forget the visual as a tool of creating meaning and telling its own story. In interviewees with TV journalists, the author has found that these journalists often have a set story in mind, and if they aren’t able to film suitable images, they settle for archive footage and cutaways and use voice over narration to tell the story in the way they wanted to tell it from the initial stages of the production, without keeping their current material in mind. The author of this paper used to have this perception as well – that as a journalist one sets out on a story with a specific angle and that it will only change if an interviewee gives one a so-called “scoop” that changes the direction of the story, or if interviewees’ unwillingness to divulge information or engage with the camera forces one to diverge from one’s original intention in creating the story. However, the specific case study in point, a five-minute documentary filmed in Accra, Ghana, changed her perception. The film initially began as a story about what made Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first leader after gaining independence from Britain, a hero. It progressed from the latter - to recording the heroic signs of Nkrumah in Accra – to investigating how historical heroes become mythical figures and how the visual symbols that represent them in turn enhances their myth inside others’ minds. In Accra there are quite a few statues, monuments and other visual symbols of Nkrumah. As with most iconic statues, their function is to pay tribute to historical figures and cement the heroes of a bygone past into the minds of those who see them. In a time where these types of statues cause a lot of controversy: the most notable case in point is the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in the author’s home country (South Africa) that lead to the start of the #RhodesMustFall-hashtag campaign that, in turn, also sparked debates about a statue of the same figure at the campus of the UK’s Oxford University. However, it was the statue...
- Language
- English
- Rights
- ©2016, authors
- Full Text
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