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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
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The capital gap: Nollywood and the limits of informal trade
More LessThis article examines Nollywood as a creative industry based in Africa's informal sector. By definition, the informal sector produces no financial records, so no quantitative economic data are presented. This research utilizes ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to highlight the importance of the video movie industry to Nigerian people, its place in their economic life and its integral role in their culture. Nollywood's intimacy with Nigerians has been achieved by way of the industry's distinctive informal system of production and distribution. This same informality prevents the video industry from establishing financial legitimacy. Without the ability to generate capital, the industry is straining against its economic limits. Thus, the cultural success of Nollywood pushes it towards inevitable formalization and uncertain consequences.
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Video exposé: Metafiction and message in Nigerian films
More LessIn this article, I discuss how Nigerian film-makers respond to discourses surrounding film-making in Nigeria through using techniques of metafiction to theorize their roles as professionals and cultural mediators. Dividing my analysis into two sections, first on the English-language 'Nollywood' and second on the Hausa-language 'Kannywood', I examine self-reflexive techniques by which film-makers draw attention to their roles as truth-tellers and message-bearers and how metafictions about the film industries illustrate tensions between a junk-journalist expos aesthetic and a celebrity culture concerned with image. While there are many similarities in how film-makers in both 'Nollywood' and 'Kannywood' respond to criticism, I argue that these metafictions reveal differences in economic and cultural context that have resulted in an increasingly upwardly mobile Nollywood, while Kannywood has remained closer to the grass roots. Ultimately, these films express on a smaller scale the film-maker's theories about what the film industry as a whole does for the nation.
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Hustlers, home-wreckers and homoeroticism: Nollywood's Beautiful Faces
More LessThis article examines the ways that Nollywood films are involved in the moral policing of the postcolonial subject both by challenging the state's moral failings and by enacting its ideological violence. I argue that although it is necessary to acknowledge how Nigerian video-films reflect the struggles, anxieties and instability of ordinary Nigerians, it is also crucial to examine the ways that they deflect various concerns about everyday life on to certain bodies. Through a close reading of Kabat Esosa Egbon's film Beautiful Faces (2004), a film about female campus cults, I demonstrate that while the film grapples with issues of violence and corruption on university campuses, it does so by channeling fears about students' educational opportunities into anxiety about women's sexual transgressions. In this way, I suggest that Beautiful Faces is typical of many Nollywood films that simultaneously challenge corrupt and wizened government institutions while also reproducing their normative and violent hetero-patriarchal position.
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Nollywood and the idea of the Nigerian cinema
More LessNollywood films are among the most visible cinematic forms in the world today, just behind India's Bollywood in the sheer quantity of films released. They are also attaining an unprecedented level of technical sophistication. This article appraises Nollywood's current vitality, but in relation to the celluloid-formatted films produced in Nigeria in the 1970s and the 1980s, which, it argues, continue to inform the aesthetic and ethical principles of the globally circulating works. Taking a film, Hostages I & II (1996a), as occupying the middle ground between the two cinematic traditions, the article proposes that the exhaustion of the celluloid films reflected the asynchrony between the discourses of modernization and the national discourses in Nigeria, but that Nollywood represents an open-to-the-world opportunity to advance the discourses.
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