Page 315 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

“program,” as was the case with the Orthodox churches. In his view, as Pente-
costals seek to extend their in®uence beyond the mere con¤nes of the church
service and to turn their members into full-time Christians, there is a need to
reach out into the sphere of popular culture and the arts. Mass Pentecostalism
requires all-round participation, and thus mass culture.
Before he was appointed pastor, Rev. Ossei Akoto and his wife would visit
the Ghana Films Cinema at the GFIC, and now he often watched Ghanaian and
Nigerian ¤lms on TV. In his view ¤lms “reveal the operation of the powers of
darkness. They give ideas about how demonic forces operate, how to counteract
evil forces with the blood of Christ, how to apply faith to counteract [the de-
monic forces].” Yet the ¤lms should not only portray evil forces but should make
clear that it is God that overcomes these forces. Thus “to me, the ending [of a
¤lm] is the message. From here I make my own assessment and judgment.” He
therefore was not bothered about the depiction of occult forces, if in the end it
was made clear that they were indeed evil. When I asked him how he knew that
the demonic images would indeed reveal what happens in the invisible world,
he emphasized that, in his opinion, about 80 percent of these visualizations were
correct. He knew this, as he himself was much engaged in deliverance (i.e., prac-
tices of exorcizing evil spirits through the Holy Spirit); he saw how demons
manifested themselves through people, and he also heard people confess, and
“what they say matches with what the ¤lms show.”
Thus, when his former schoolmate, the producer, director, and actor Augustine
Abbey (alias Idikoko), asked him to play the role of a pastor in the ¤lm Stolen
Bible (Secret Society) I and II (Idikoko Ventures 2001–2002), he accepted. Stolen
Bible features a struggle between a secret society consisting of members who
owe their wealth to a (spiritual) sacri¤ce of a beloved person, on the one hand,
and divine power, embodied by a staunch Christian woman and a strong pastor,
7
on the other. The deliverance scene is intense, powerful, and highly realistic,
and Akoto was at his best. He let himself go, as he usually does when he is in
church. Knowing that many people would watch the movie, he wanted to preach
a clear message. But this time it went even better than usual, because normally
when he engages in deliverance he is tense, fearful, and cautious. In this situa-
tion, however, he experiences no fear and thus can perform very well. For him
it was “great fun to cast out devils!”
Thus the power of a movie seems to derive from the extent to which it is able
to appear as real, as a documentation of the spiritual realm, rather than just
¤ction. Viewers must be made to forget that they are merely watching a ¤lm
(indeed, often the criticism of people who dislike a ¤lm is that it is too arti-
¤cial). A good movie depends on eradicating any trace of the ¤lm as ¤ction and,
instead, successfully featuring it as a revelation, thereby, with the help of the
camera, convincingly bridging the realms of the visible and the invisible. In this
sense ¤lms owe their power to their capacity to erase their own mediated nature
and claim “im-media-cy” (Plate 2003, 7). Akoto’s statement nicely captures the
predicament of video-¤lm production. While movies are organized as revela-

304 Birgit Meyer