In Defence of the Films We Have Made

Abstract

On the theme of Motion Picture as a tool for National Rebirth and Economic Empowerment, I think I am, properly speaking, out of my element. I have never related to the motion picture business at any level other than as an avid watcher of films. I run away from the television set. But films always bring me back. No matter how bad a film is, I like to see how the story will end. I plod on even when it is the case that I have figured out in advance how the story will end. I don’t think that Professor Soyinka knows more than this about my relationship with the motion picture. In choosing me to stand in for him, he is clearly sending a cat among the pigeons. If he was here himself, he would have been quite a pigeon among the pigeons or a cat among cats. He has had quite a relationship, a very intimate relationship I must say, with film as a medium. He would have been in the best position to deploy his many decades of acting, music-making and film-making in the context of his eminently overarching pursuit, a life-time’s pursuit, of drama as a medium.