Title: Reimagining the 'Blockbuster' for Nigerian Cinema: The Nollywood Narrative Aesthetic of Affective Spectacle
Abstract: Introduction My interest in Nollywood, the growing Nigerian film industry, began during my travels around Nigeria in the summers of 2011 and 2012. During my time in Naija, I walked through city street markets and shops in Lagos's Ikeja neighborhood and along Port Harcourt's Aba Express Road, ate in open air cafes and fast food restaurants in and outside Abuja, Calabar, and the University of Uyo, and attended village social gatherings in the Cross River State town of Obudu. (1) Films lined the stalls of street vendors. Men and women sold films on street corners from baskets and boxes strategically balanced on their heads. People crowded around tiny televisions in eateries and village compounds to watch Nollywood features. International satellite television network AfricaTV and its subsidiaries broadcasted movies like Sweet Mama, Who Will Tell the President, and The President Must Die throughout each day. movie theaters in Enugu and Port Harcourt, Nollywood films played alongside Hollywood features. John C. McCall writes, In market stalls and corner stores across Nigeria ... these market driven movies have become the engine of a distinctively African popular culture. (2) Naija, Nollywood is everywhere. Nollywood was not always such a presence in Nigeria. The origins of film in the country date back to British colonial rule when film production and dissemination was government controlled. Chukwuma Okoye points out that colonial film in Nigeria operated as a mechanism for complete colonization of the African and European mind. Okoye states, Not only were these films methodically chosen to glorify the image of the colonizer, but they also denigrated the humanity of the colonized ... documentaries that deified the Queen of England and demonstrated English etiquette and technological wizardry were made for native consumption. When Africans began to be visually represented on the screens, they were portrayed as undignified and primitive. (3) After Nigeria gained its independence from Great Britain in 1960, Nigerian themes and performance styles began to enter films, particularly Yoruba cultural elements such as the Yoruba traveling theater, musical forms like fuji and juju, and plotlines from familiar television dramas. Yet, cinema houses in the nation mainly showed films imported from Europe and America. Ultimately, due to the rise of state funded television broadcast stations which adapted and broadcast popular theater productions for the small screen, the high cost of film production, a government moratorium on foreign film imports, and increasing economic and political instability in the 1980s, cinema patronage sharply decreased. (4) Over the last twenty years, Nollywood has grown into the second largest film industry in the world behind India's Bollywood and ahead of Hollywood in the United States thanks in large part to the popularity of the dramatic narrative conventions that the industry has perfected. (5) Currently, Nollywood filmmakers are producing movies that can fall into two camps, the inexpensive traditional direct to video cultural melodrama and the emerging theatrical film that retains Nigerian narrative forms while attempting to mirror the technological methods of a big budget feature. These two prominent types of Nigerian films can be considered Nollywood blockbusters when the term is divorced from the prevailing 'westernized' notion that prescribes blockbuster as a feature produced on a grand scale with a multi-million dollar budget, high production value, well-known actresses and actors, and the latest special effects and digital advances. (6) I argue here that a new definition of blockbuster that privileges storytelling over production gimmicks is necessary in order to carefully and thoroughly analyze the two types of features currently produced in Nigeria. While Nigerian films do rely upon the star power of popular actresses and actors such as Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, Jim Iyke, and Mercy Johnson, the Nollywood blockbuster can be defined by its narrative spectacle, or hyper-dramatic plotlines that reflect the lived conditions and social pathologies that the Nigerian people face. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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