A Tumultuous, yet Sombre Week, Should remind us all of Legacy.
The sense-making is many fold, and even those who might assert they’re distant from events, symbolism and visual parallelism loom large — The Queen has died, Long live the King”.
It’s the stuff of lores, an event outside many’s lifespan, being played out in a modern setting. History’s prescience, as well as presentness illustrates a finiteness. And then there’s the end. Goodness, yet also continuation — maybe.
Played out in modern house holds debated on radio stations like LBC, viewers speak about the impact it has on them and the introspection of trying to make sense for their own lives — that’s the symbolism.
Like 99% of HRH subjects, I am so far removed from their orbit. The photo is a rare occasion meeting Prince, now King Charles III, courtesy of his Majesty’s Trust, which helps youngsters tap into grants to find them careers. “How are they doing?”, a reference to my students, he asked.
King Charles III in his address alluded to networks he may have to pass over, because of intended new commitments. Was there ever a time when the young need the spotlight? A new job for the new Prince of Wales! And then the rest of the nation caught between solemnity and the searing heel of a new government.
And yet, I found myself more than other times thinking intensely about my mum, who was in her own right a Queen. No, really an elder back in Ghana. Mum’s legacy was our family’s torch bearing to do to others what we wanted them to do to us.
How could we renew our pledge to fulfil her ambition, whilst capturing our own. Her sombre parting some years back was rejuvenated this week, and how do you capture aspirations into a sense of a life well lived. Maybe the feeling, because of the current mood, will be fleeting, but it’s there.
It’s remarkable, and not, how many people feel the weight of events, and that was before the royal passing. Visual parallelism is the search for that pithy metaphor that is refracted through events and like rays absorbed.
Being Bolder than Before. That’s it! That’s the visual parallelism. Do you ever look around you and feel you’re treading water; that you’ve hardly made inroads. Yet a solution seems at a distance.
Transitioning from the mesa to the meta is the leap, but how physically can this be achieved?
One of the legacies, spoken about in broadcast tributes of the Monarchy was how they were able to reinvent themselves for the times. Of course they’d have at their disposal the best comms experts to help them achieve this, but the sentiment is acknowledged. How do you become the version of you that will one day present itself?
Can the events of the next week help reset collective thinking in the UK, or will the UK’s image take further chipping? The answer is not a mystery.
But personally, how do you become the version of you that will one day present itself? A challenge is to make sense of the conflicting forces that appear to be strafing people’s lives e.g. rights of one’s body, cost of living etc. And those charged with telling these stories so they move dials. Big dials.
That got me thinking about the late Robert Drew. Drew was the father of cinema verite, a radical style and form introduced in the 1960s. In 2012, I was curious. Cinema is such a broad canvas, and whilst many scholars recognise the impact of cinema verite in the 1960s as a powerful ( still) story form, given cinema’s vast proscenium, how could that be redeveloped?
In interviewing him, it became clear he wanted to share his legacy for others to run with. I would find various answers from him and through extensive research, which might provide solutions to current video journalism storytelling.
A friend reminded me today of the need, if that’s the word, to up our game by sharing. What he called deep sharing that will have an impact. He’s making sense. He was making sense.
