Best Story Wins: Truths and Fictions in American Presidential Narratives

Harvey O’Brien

• 📅Tuesday, October 22, 2024
• 🕥10:45 – 12:30
• 🏟Newtownpark Pastoral Centre (map)

With the US Presidential Election two weeks away, Dr. Harvey O’Brien, Head of Film at UCD, takes a look at stories about the American presidency and the lines between imagination and reality in documentary and fiction. Chief Executives have always spun yarns about themselves and had yarns spun around them. This presentation will look at examples from past and present of how story is a powerful tool in the construction of legacy, wielded from both within and outside of the circle of authority to gain rhetorical power or to assert it as a means of control, although it doesn’t always hold.