Page 316 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 14.4. Still from the video ¤lm Stolen Bible (produced by Great Idikoko
Ventures).

tions of the struggle between divine and demonic forces, obviously they cannot
simply record what goes on in the invisible realm. Rather, as Akoto’s statement
shows, they have to fake “the real thing” in order to make it seem as realistic as
possible. Since the camera is a machine compelled to visualize (in Heidegger’s
words, to construct the “world as picture” [cf. Weber 1996, 76ff.]), it reduces
even those matters that may initially resist or not lend themselves easily to
audiovisual representation, to moving images (Meyer 2005).
It is precisely this gap between the camera as an image-producing device
and its object that is depicted in ¤g. 14.1, which suggests that the camera, in
attempting to capture the divine, mysti¤es rather than visualizes. The video
camera cannot help but construct images of the divine, and thus mediate Chris-
tianity’s invisible in line with the logic of ¤lm production, and yet these images
can never be fully consonant with it. Thus the painting seems to infer that video
¤lms market their own visions, legitimize them with some biblical quote or
Christian slogan, and invest them with a new aura, but all this amounts only to
a camera-produced mediation of the invisible which is in no way superior to
older attempts to mediate the invisible, such as devotional art. The impossibility
of true representation notwithstanding, impossible representations are made all

Impossible Representations 305