Nollywood Style: Nigerian Movies and 'Shifting Perceptions of Worth'

Articles Nollywood Style

By Jeffrey Geiger

Keywords: Nigerian cinema, video film, film canon, industry standards, political aesthetics, decolonization, third cinema, national cinema

58 Ifilminternational issue 6o

Below Within Our Gates (1920)

As in filming traditions ranging from Taiwan to Senegal, the shoot starts with a brief ceremony. The director Lancelot Imasuen lays his hands on the camera, saying, 'the artists will perform to their optimum, because the spirit of God has taken over ...' Imasuen speaks to the camera: 'You will function to capacity. You will function above your limit ... Hallelujah. I'm rolling.' This opening scene to Ben Addelman's and Samir Mallal's Nollywood Babylon (2008) exemplifies the passion and belief systems that lie behind Nollywood film-making, arguably the most significant postcolonial cinema phenomenon to appear in Africa since decolonization began in

Articles Nollywood Style earnest during the late-1950s and early-1960s. Since the 1990s, the Nigerian movie industry has become a glohal force, success that has come as something of a surprise to practitioners and critics alike, as Nollywood gestures towards the future not only of African film, but of 'third' and emerging world cinemas as well.^ In 2009, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics reported that Nigerian film productivity had surpassed that of the United States, making it second in the world behind India. The announcement underplayed disparities in likefor-like income, but was nonetheless a crucial development that asserted what many already knew: the movement had 'gone global'. Yet in spite of international visibility, Nollywood is only beginning to receive any serious critical attention. When these assessments are positive, it tends to be viewed through the lens of economic and industrial analyses related to Nigeria's heightened status in global DVD/ video markets. When negative, critics continue to bemoan its seemingly amateur production values, actors with little training, overwrought plots featuring sensationalist romantic entanglements, violence, crime, supernatural phenomena, and religious preachments. Even its defenders characterize the films as 'garish melodramas lapped up by vast audiences' (Parkinson 2009).^ The 'ethnographic' aesthetics of Pieter Hugo's (2009) photographs self-consciously points to a further problematic tendency: exoticizing the movement from western standpoints, stereotyping its excesses and perceived 'strangeness' (Fowley 2010). Technically, Nollywood doesn't produce 'films' at all - hence the widely-used term 'video films' - and for many it more closely resembles the television soap operas that in part influenced it. Indeed, when Nollywood as a mass phenomenon broke out with Kenneth Nnebue's Liuing in Bondage in 1992, Mexican telenovelas were dominating Nigerian television schedules.-' With little visibility at the world's largest prestige festivals, Nollywood is still portrayed as marginal, even eccentric. As portrayed in Franco Sacchi's documentary This is Nollywood (2007), it is the 'little industry that could': 'Armed with a few thousand dollars, a digital camera, and a couple of lights, Nigerian directors have created a $236 million industry.' Sacchi's documentary leaves us with the sense of an industry perched on the

verge of a major international breakthrough, yet still stylistically and professionally 'immature'. Rather than pursue the plotlines of an underdog industry or of homemade yarns for the masses, this article engages with Nollywood in the context of ongoing remediations and through a consideration of its complex relationship to industry professionals, popular audiences, and international critics. Moreover, I would echo the call made by Jonathan Haynes that 'it is time to roll out the full disciplinary apparatus of film studies and apply it to the video films', since 'we have hardly begun describing them in the normal ways applied to other film cultures' (Haynes 2010: 13). Nollywood films have too rarely been analysed as complex texts, and the idea of working through detailed 'close readings' of the video films would seem alien to most. Usually, questions of thematics, aesthetics, editing, uses of sound, and other filmic strategies are avoided unless the point is to criticize, or apologize for weaknesses. This resistance to serious examination of Nollywood movies arguably stems from expectations relating to cinematic 'quality' and the need to raise Nollywood up to 'international industrial standards' (Barrot 2009: 58). As filmmaker Adekunle Detokunbo-Bello a n d Odeon special projects manager Moses Babatope suggested at the 'Nollywood Now!' festival in Deptford, while Nollywood certainly 'deserves international recognition' it is still 'struggling' and remains 'challenged' in areas such as production quality, which makes it difficult to 'properly' bring complex stories to life."* In spite of these concerns, I want to take advantage here of a certain mobility and volatility that always underlies evaluative standards: what Laura Hubner concisely refers to in Valuing Films as 'shifting perceptions of worth' (2011: 217). In this sense, this article is not a defence of Nollywood that valorizes the video films in terms of inherited industrial and critical standards; I am suggesting instead a revaluation of Nollywood through close engagement with the movies as social, narrative, and aesthetic objects of inquiry. In so doing, I hope to rethink some of the conventional debates surrounding Nollywood and, perhaps implicitly, contribute to the work of re-examining the uneven formation of a film 'canon' that has emerged through a con-

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NoUywood style has been worth taking seriously for some time ... sensus of academic, industry, and journalistic forces (Lupo 2011; Nayar 2009). I further want to suggest that Nollywood style has been worth taking seriously for some time, even before recent attempts at self-reinvention, where strategies for bigger budgets, better equipment, better training for actors - for in short achieving the quality picture to break into big league festivals - have become central to industry discussions.^ Whatever international prestige lies around the corner, the modes of film-making that established Nollywood - the cheap and rapidly produced videos of the 1990s and 2000s - will probably always be maligned as 'illegitimate' cinema. Yet this earlier work continues to resonate, finding new audiences via the Internet and other venues, and might be seen as the quintessence of Nollywood style. It was during the 1990s when I first encountered Nollywood - and in particular the films of Chico Ejiro, addressed in more detail below - at public screenings in Brixton and on the Stockwell Park Estate in south London. These boisterous events, primarily aimed at British-Nigerian filmgoers, suggested that far from suffering from a lack or aspiring towards some unattainable norm, the films had already developed techniques of production, distribution, and consumption that were gesturing to the future of film-making.

Evaluative standards What makes Nollywood movies 'worthy' of close analysis? In their ideological diversity and often conflicting messages regarding political action and the legacies of colonialism (not to mention concerns that the movies too often indulge in misogynistic fantasy, superstition, violence, and capitalist greed), most Nollywood movies would seem counter to the political and aesthetic sensibilities demanded of postcolonial African film, in particular the radical collectivism of African Third Cinema. The dilemma that Nollywood presents to African film scholarship is concisely summed up by Ethiopian American film-maker Lucy Gebre-Egziabher, who has asked whether Nollywood's sueeess 60 Ifilminternational issue 6o

might paradoxically be 'holding back' the African industry's broader potential. According to Gebre-Egziabher: African film-makers ean now produce their films on a small budget, and after the festival route ean go directly to video distribution of their films in their respeetive eountries. There are, however, new challenges ahead: 1) Will video-films negatively affeet the standard of African einema? 2) Is the poor quality of storytelling and production of the video-films conditioning the African filmgoer to appreciate only this type of'genre'? Where does African einema go from here? In spite of the great sacrifices and achievements by the pioneers of this einema like Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Med Hondo (Mauritania), Sarah Maldoror (Guadeloupe), San Faye (Senegal), Halle Gerima (Ethiopia), Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal), to name a few, African einema is at a erueial cross roads. TWo parallel cinemas, one with a tradition of being used to espouse soeiopolitieal ehange, the other with a current trend toward a lowbrow entertainment culture. (Gebre-Egziabher 2006: 5) A similar argument emerged at a famous row at FESPACO in 2005, when director Mahamet SalehHaroun was asked about adopting Nigerian methods to raise the profile of Chadian cinema. He responded that he was an 'artist' and not an 'entertainer' (Murphy and Williams 2007: 25). Yet there is a paradox at the heart of critiques that target Nollywood's 'lowbrow entertainment culture', for, as Hubner suggests, while postmodern critique has undermined any great 'claim to universality', there are still embedded perceptions of'taste' and 'quality' that inhere in practices of film interpretation and evaluation. Hubner argues that, 'because evaluation lies at the root of all (film) analysis, and is embedded within critical theory, we inevitably get tied up in it, often at the moment we are trying to step back and assess it' (2011: 218). The praetiee of film analysis has long been paradoxically 'tied up' in established evaluative standards. Indeed the lingering conven-


One might ask, does Nigeria need a western auteur (a 'Scorsese')...? tions of auteurist criticism - where influential figures such as Andrew Sarris stressed personal style, continuity of themes, and 'technical competence' (1996 [1968]: 44) - and auteurism's intertwined relationship with national cinema scholarship, form a key backdrop to the elision of mass movements such as Nollywood from the critical map. As far back as 1981, Edward Buscombe's 'Film History and the Idea of a National Cinema' identified tensions around notions of'quality' and 'the popular' and of finding ways around these tensions. Indeed, questions concerning how scholarship might negotiate the gap between 'official' concepts of so-called 'taste' and the seemingly lowbrow what Jean-Pierre Jeancolas (1992) calls the 'inexportable' - realms of mass popularity have been voiced by a number of critics. Charles Acland suggests that, 'the selective memory [of cinema scholarship] confirms a ruling sense of embarrassment about the popular cinema culture, reflecting how bound by taste these appeals for a "proper" national cinema are' (2003: 190). Yet there are other critical angles gaining momentum. Innocent Ebere Uwah has advocated for 'nuanced textual analysis' that engages with Nigerian video films as 'vehicles of encoded messages with themes and languages that (re)present the life patterns of proximate Nigerian consumers' (2009: 82). Jonathan Haynes (2000; 2010) has championed Nollywood since the 1990s, defending the cultural value and politics of mass entertainment. Other breakthroughs in Nollywood studies have included the 'Nollywood and Beyond' symposium at Mainz in 2009, and the 'Nollywood in Africa, Africa in Noll3rwood' conference of 2011 in Lagos; the latter, convened by Onookome Okome and Emevwo Biakolo, importantly brought scholars and practitioners together and into dialogue. The recent Neu; York Times feature on the director Kunle Afolayan perhaps indicates at last something resembling mainstream acceptance (or appropriation) of Nollywood into western critical frameworks. Even here, however, Andrew Rice's piece, 'A Scorsese in Lagos'

(2012), belies an inability to shake off canonical conventions, arguing, most of the {Nollywood] movies themselves are awful, marred by slapdash production, melodramatic acting and ludicrous plots. Afolayan, who is 37, is one of a group of upstart directors trying to transcend those rote formulas and low expectations. His breakthrough film, the 2009 thriller 'The Figurine,' was an aesthetic leap: while no viewer would confuse it with 'Citizen Kane,' to Nigerians it announced the arrival of a swaggering talent keen to upset an immature industry. (2012: MM26) One might ask, does Nigeria need a western auteur (a 'Scorsese') when there have already been the distinctive styles of the Ejiro brothers, Izu Ojukwu, and, among wider global networks, Tony Abulu? In spite of the much-recycled clichés about a 'slapdash' and 'immature' industry, the work of critics such as Haynes, Okome (2007a; 2007b), Moradewun Adejunmobi (2007), and John C. McCall (2007), to name a few, has already moved beyond such dismissals, addressing how Nollywood engages with colonial histories through diverse and often elliptical strategies, how it suggests both conflicts and synergies with the legacies of African Third Cinema, and ultimately how it can serve to question embedded hierarchies of good taste, aesthetics, and good politics.^ My specific angle here comes out of an interest in the cultural and aesthetic impact of video and digital practices and the ways we might formulate a vocabulary for small-scale film-making sidelined by established critical standards - particularly when, in the case of Nollywood, these practices form part of a movement too diverse and volatile to embody what Gramsci described as the collective politics of a 'national popular' (2000: 364). Nollywood hovers at the interstices of cinema studies: enormously popular yet far from suggesting unified political or aesthetic strategies that might be identified, and thus embraced, by the critical mainstream. In this sense it inverts the model of acclaimed experimental or countercinema films, which commonly display self-conscious aesthetic strategies while defying pressures to appeal to mass audiences (as, for example, the work of Ghanaian experimental film-maker

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Articles Nollywood Style Akosua Adoma Owusu, whose My White Baby [Me Broni Ba, 2010] is a 'lyrical portrait of hair salons' set in Kumasi; her Drexciya (2011] was made in an abandoned public swimming pool in Accra). Such films foreground virtuosic style while meditating on less visible social and historical facets of west African life, evincing what Third Cinema scholars have called a 'political aesthetics' that might challenge the complacent consumption of film as entertainment. The question of political aesthetics as they pertain to Nollywood, however, demands a more thorough consideration of how popular entertainment can engage with modes of political resistance and critique.

Reframing political aesthetics A frequent criticism of Nollywood points to its ehaotie emergenee and lack of coherence, both as a commercial industry and in its aesthetic and social objectives. Yet the very idea of African colonization, V. Y Mudimbe points out, was grounded in the idea of bringing order and aesthetic unity to the disruptive African scene: 'Although generalisations are of course dangerous, colonialism and colonisation basically mean organisation, arrangement. The two words derive from the latin word colBre, meaning to cultivate or design' (1988:1). As John C. McCall stresses, one of Nollywood's defining characteristics is in fact its lack of order, made up as it is of 'a shifting field of countless independent contractors'. Rather than embodying the hierarchical integration of most western film industries, Nollywood is 'radically horizontal in its organisation' (McCall 2007: 96). Hence the seeming messiness ofthe Nollywood product is unfavourably compared to the 'quality' of other national einema outputs. Ideologically, the house that Nollywood built is similarly unstable and difficult to assess within notions of political aesthetics as defined by African Third Cinema theory, influenced in particular by the pioneering work of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon. In this view, postcolonial filmmaking and other creative arts in Afriea labour under the shadow of the colonizer-colonized legacy. Questions of, in Fanon's terms, decolonizing postcolonial cultures - and precisely through what cultural forms and praetiees this deeolonization might eome about - have been crucial

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to these debates (Fanon 1963: 204-48). As Frank Ukadike puts it: The earliest films made by the pioneers of African cinema were deliberately didactic and overtly political. The primary goals were to use the medium to inform, to educate, and to project authentic visions of Africa and its peoples as well as to assist in reversing the demeaning stereotypical images of Africa found in dominant representations of the continent. (2002: xviii) Ukadike further stresses that cinema was meant to 'speak to the people while also being an impetus for social change'. Much of Third Cinema's understanding of this decolonizing cinema aesthetic was influenced by Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism (associated with western colonial and neocolonial practices) and Gramseian notions of political change underpinned by cultural and artistic productions that eould manifest a eollective will. Certainly, then, the political consciousness displayed by most Nollywood movies would seem antithetical to Third Cinema: openly commercial, culturally and ideologically dispersed, with tendencies towards sensationalism and stereotype.' Yet interestingly one of the architects of African Third Cinema criticism, Teshome Gabriel, acknowledged the need to avoid fixed or oppositional theories, stressing that there is no simple dividing line between Third Cinema and the popular; indeed Third Cinema might be seen as a 'guardian of popular memory' (1989: 53). Moreover, Gabriel argued, 'the tactics of Third Cinema have changed, beeoming based less on oppositional strategies than on more complex, more mixed, more ironic, forms of resistance.' Third Cinema beeomes in this sense 'an increasingly creolized form, in much the same way that peoples from various parts of the Third World have found themselves intermingling in the metropolitan centers of "developed" countries' (2009). Indeed, Third Cinema and its strategies should be seen as fluid and flexible, providing an example of 'what we today might call "composite" politics, in which many group identities and affiliations intermingle and overlap' (Gabriel 2009). If, as Gabriel suggests. Third Cinema always drew its strength from this sense of diversity and multiplicity, Nollywood similarly evidences


Nollywood in this sense is a kind of 'moving target' that constantly transforms as technologies, markets, and cultural expectations also change ... these multivalent - and unstable - properties, a product of complex interrelations between remediation, innovative modes of production and distribution, mass consumption, and the uneven postcolonial emergence of African culture industries. Nollywood in this sense is a kind of 'moving target' that constantly transforms as technologies, markets, and cultural expectations also change (Adejunmobi2012). Alexie Tcheuyap sees Nollywood 'for better or worse' as 'the extreme case of a revolution against the (post)colonial entrapment of foreign charity, high costs and discursive discipline' (2011: 20). Indeed, critics such as McCall have further resisted dismissals of Nollywood's multifarious populist force, suggesting that, 'culture, particularly popular culture [...] is no monolithic force of oppression. It is a dynamic and irreducible swirl of of expressions, events, desires, and products', and 'notoriously difficult to predict or regulate'. Noll5rwood, rather than a 'lowbrow entertainment', serves instead as a catalyst for pan-African discourse and a forum 'that makes speaking of pan-African cinema and indeed panAfrican culture possible for the first time' (2007: 95-96). Noll5rwood has indeed broken through to reach far beyond the markets of Lagos and Abuja, but it would be difficult to overstate the ongoing logistical and societal difficulties faced by Nigerian film-makers. The superficial glamour of the oil-rich elite, often portrayed in Nollywood productions, fails to mask the precarious living standards faced by most Nigerians. Health care, for example - one of the yardsticks of social wellbeing - has been placed among the 'worst in the world'. Nearly half the population of Nigeria still lacks adequate water supplies and sanitation (Obinna 2012).^ Crime, too, remains a palpable feature of Nigerian life, particularly in densely-populated Lagos. Recent terror attacks in Abuja have only underlined a prevalent sense of uncertainty and unrest. These challenges form an important backdrop not only to Nollywood's instability as an industry,^ but to the concerns and themes of its mov-

ies, which often deal with the gap between rich and poor, prevalent crime, drug abuse, domestic problems, and religious conflict. Of course simply portraying these issues does not constitute a unified political stance, and Nollywood's tendencies towards spectacle and hyperbole could be read as exploitation rather than social intervention. Here Brian Larkin's argument that Nollywood displays an 'aesthetics of outrage' becomes useful for developing more coherent political readings of the melodramatic plotlines, overwrought acting, and on-the-run technique that characterizes much Nigerian cinema. Larkin argues that Nollywood can invoke 'a mode of cinematic address that rests on the outrageous abrogation of deep cultural norms to generate shock and anger in the viewer' (2008:13). In addition to such explicit strategies, Nollywood films can register subtler versions of what Gabriel has called 'more mixed, more ironic, forms of resistance'. Certainly many Nollywood directors - even while expressing admiration for Hollywood's success at reaching mass audiences - accent their work with a postcolonial sensibility that wryly gestures towards Nigeria's colonial past and to the cultural and economic hegemony of western powers. For Okome, Nollywood typically encompasses what Françoise Bayart called Africa's 'ironic chorus'; it 'performs the "discontent" of Africa's postcoloniality' (2007a: 8-10). Nollywood films can be seen to echo, if obliquely, the political stance of Nigerian writers and artists who grew up in the shadow of British rule, such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. There is, for example, the potent commentary on Lagos's extreme economic divides in Chico Ejiro's Onome (1996); the religious tensions of Fjiro's Festiua! of Fire (1999), where early missionary encounters with traditional beliefs in Eastern Nigeria recall Achebe's rendering of Umuofia village before the coming of Christianity in Things Fall Apart (1958) (Uwah 2011: 92); and the ironic use of the English folk song 'Streets of London', by Ralph McTell, in Ernest Obi's Annabel (2001), the song's references to those discarded by society at the

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very heart of the British empire paralleling the hazards of surviving in modern, urban Nigeria. Moreover, the video films should not just be assessed in terms of aesthetic or ideological content but, as Okome stresses, as 'social texts' that are forms of public experience and public performance, watched and - with vocal irony interacted with in sites that range from street market stalls to informal 'video parlours' and private homes (Okome 2007a: 7). So where do we situate NoUywood's political aesthetics? It is worth briefly considering Nollywood style within the context of other film-making movements maligned for seemingly haphazard production methods, melodramatic storylines, amateur acting, and so on: African American 'race movies' are a case in point. Like Nollywood, race movies in the United States were neither self-consciously amateur nor avant-garde, they were made by professionals with an interest in taking advantage of the burgeoning need for films that spoke to African American concerns and appealed to popular tastes. Leaving aside race movies funded by 'white money' (see Rhines 1996), the practices and reception of independent black film-makers such as Oscar Micheaux can be seen to set a precedent for thinking about Nollywood's complex status and value. Micheaux's films display a political aesthetics that suggest an ironic form of resistance to Hollywood's dominant practices. Still, questions about the aesthetic value of Micheaux's work have long clouded critical discussions. As Richard Gehr notes.


Left The Birth of a Nation (1915) Right Within Our Gates (1920)

Micheaux's work was 'condemned by both black and white critics for its lack of craftsmanship and competence' (1991: 34). It is true that Micheaux's films seem to eschew conventions of cinematic good taste and are rarely technically seamless (as the wobbly scenery in Swing! [1938] clearly shows). Like video films coming out of Nollywood, Micheaux's movies were distributed in ad hoc and innovative ways: shown in churches, rented halls, even private homes, and they encouraged an animated audience interaction (Bowser and Spence 2000: 84; Green 2000: 262). Micheaux's seeming lack of technique and formal distribution methods, however, formed part of a broader ethos that ran counter to hegemonic Hollywood modes of production and distribution - particularly as established by the blockbuster success of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In many ways Griffith's nemesis, Micheaux honed a technique - in no small part due to severe budget, equipment, and time constraints - that invokes the aesthetics of low-budget nonfiction and amateur films. The result is rough-hewn, documentary-like images that have an uncanny ability to uncover the ideological ugliness beneath Hollywood's polished veneer. J. Ronald Green suggests that Micheaux's style might be best understood in terms of textual 'glossing': a film like Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) not only reframes The Birth of a Nation's Manichaean worldview, it deconstructs its appearance of ideological unity (2000: 49).

Articles Nollywood Style Drawing attention to the artifieiality of established screen histories and to the limits of official narratives, Micheaux's work implies how easily public perceptions of truth and authenticity might be manipulated. In the documentary No!!yu)ood Babylon, Lancelot Imasuen speaks of 'Nollywood style' as grounded in filming rapidly, cheaply, on the run. It's a 'pop pop pop' style, a sharp 'let's go let's go' approach. Yet what results is often arguably denser and more narratively complex than the streamlined products of Hollywood or Bollywood. In Nollywood's unvarnished and disruptive filmic world, the screen image can rarely be taken at face value, and viewers are invited to question and interrogate the appearance of realities produced on screen. Interestingly Larkin observes that Nigerian video films frequently revisit themes of false appearances: businessmen who belong to cults in order to beeome sueeessful, [...] fraudsters who mask themselves to betray unsuspecting victims, [...] grandmothers who ensoreell their ehildren and grandchildren, all represent a world where people who appear one way turn out to be something else. In this world the visible grounds of daily experienee eannot be taken at faee value and vertiginous sueeess and disaster are all too common. (Larkin 2008: 13) While not always explicitly or uniformly politically-minded in the sense of traditional definitions of Third Cinema, many Nolljrwood films, like Micheaux's work, are marked by a refusal of mainstream film-making conventions: created with an urgency that often refutes the conventions of cinematic illusion, narrative transparency, hero identification, and other (western) realist strategies. To briefly demonstrate this, I'd like to turn to a video film that has been finding new audienees reeently via the internet - Chieo Ejiro's Deadly A/fair (1995) -just one of over a hundred made by the direetor known as 'Mr Prolifie'.

Deadly Affair (A True Life Story) The following dismissive assessment of Chieo Ejiro, published widely, is typieal: 'he direeted

over 80 movies within a 5-year period ... They feature story lines relevant to Nigerians but have poor produetion quality: terrible acting, muddled sound, and amateurish cinematography are prevalent throughout his oeuvre' (Steinglass 2002). The title of Matt Steinglass's 2002 Neu; York Times piece on Ejiro seems to sum up the critical consensus: 'When There's Too Much of a Not-Very-Good Thing'.i° It is true that Ejiro has been well known for producing several movies at once, even shooting a whole movie in a few days. His work includes the ambitious religious tale Festiua! o/Fire, mentioned above, and television soaps such as True Heroes. In spite of dismissive critics, fansites place Chico and his brother Zeb (also a director) among Noll3rwood royalty: one of the most 'popular families ruling the Nigerian entertainment industry' (Popoola 2011).•'•' Chico Ejiro has said in interviews he wants to 'prepare Nollywood for the big global fight', yet remains committed to appealing to the Nigerian market. He succinctly sums up the practicalities and politics of the industry: In Hollywood, a particular corporate body will be willing to meet [a large] budget beeause they know they have the market and means to recover their money. In Nigeria, if you manage to shoot, you don't have the means to recover your money beeause of the high level of piracy. You cut down budgets in Nigeria to be able to reeover your money beeause the Nigerian market is a primary market' (NigeriaFilms.com 2005). Ejiro's Deadly A/fair (A True life Story) is one of these 'no-budget' movies which, unlike his Festiua! o/Fire or Hit The Street (2004), has never received attention from erities. It might be called a 'typical' Nolljrwood film of the mid1990s: obviously made cheaply and quickly, it features violence, sensation, and highlights the contrasts between urban and rural life, between the worlds of sharp, 'let's go let's go' capitalist ruthlessness and traditional values being effaced by modern demands. As Pierre Barrot argues, Ejiro rarely shies away 'from excessive violence, vulgarity, or bad taste' (2009: 31). But Deadly A/fair is not a simple or simplistic film, and a closer look reveals its formal and narrative eomplexity. Deadly A/fair eentres on the

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fraught relationship of Ikechukwu (Emeka Ike, whose character is also referred to as IK and Ike), and Isabella (Dolly Unachukwu in her first major video film role). IK has come to Lagos to seek opportunity and fortune unimaginable in his rural village home while Isabella, we learn, is an aggressive gang leader who, as one character puts it, 'controls 60 per cent of the criminal activities in this town - 419 [scams], smuggling, hoarding'. In spite of her severity in dealing with anyone who crosses her, Isabella retains a soft spot for IK, and though she is 'old enough to be his mother' (Unachukwu was actually 26 at the time), she often expresses a desire to marry and have children with him. IK, however, has other plans, and continues a romantic relationship with a woman closer to his age. Bola (Sandra Achums). This leads to Isabella's jealous rages, threats of retribution, attacks on Bola, and ultimately the older woman's desperate attempts at sorcery to win back IK's ambivalent affections. As the film opens, an establishing shot of a white house in an affluent area of Lagos sets the scene of this 'true life story'. We see a close up of a woman's face - Isabella - softly uttering 'IK', and though difficult to notice at first, the image is shot in a mirror, an implication of doubling or false appearance which soon becomes an important trope throughout the film. IK, dressed in blue, is sprawled on the bed under a pink satin sheet, clutching a large stuffed lion. The scene connotes a secure and serene space, and the dialogue spoken largely


Left Deadly A^air (1995) Right Deadly A//air (1995)

in Igbo suggests a further sense of intimacy and separation from 'official' restraints and the encroaching urban world, a distance suggested too by an emphasis on birds and other animals in the shot of the sleeping IK. The space in which IK rests, infant-like, is overtly feminine, even womblike, yet also incipiently threatening, as stated in the title song that plays over the images. Undercutting the prevailing sense of security and sensual comfort that the mise-en-scène creates, the song insists, 'What kind of world is this? It's dangerous ...' Isabella (which IK shortens to Bella) has been calling IK's name in a soothing, mothering fashion; indeed, any presumption of IK's adult masculinity is immediately undermined, not only through an emphasis on feminine space but on imaging the film's male lead as an overgrown child. As it transpires, these connotations provide a clue: the deadly affair turns out not to be the criminal dealings at the heart of the film but a fact revealed in the film's final scene. IK's lover Bella is in fact his mother, who abandoned him in his home village as an infant and went off to Lagos. As the scene indicates, Ejiro uses strong colour coding throughout the film: when Isabella is later arrested, she is dressed demurely in white; a passionate scene with IK and his other, younger lover shows them dressed in bright red. Here the overriding emphasis is on blue: blue satin sheets, IK's blue clothes, the blue tinge of the television running in the background, which is then doubled in


Bella's mirror. Blue, with its associations with positive emotion in Nigeria, becomes a motif for this moment in IK and Isabella's relationship a fleeting instant away from a fractious outside world that refuses stability or constancy. Later, Bella will try to conjure this moment with a magic blue 'candle of love' in hope of reconstructing IK's lost affections. In the film's final scene, she is dressed in demure blue, an ironic comment, perhaps, on the utter rupture of their relationship. Blue may connote stability and tranquillity, but as the title song reminds us, the world is populated by 'ups and downs, sometimes deception'. The constant presence of the mirror - and the mirror shot is itself mirrored, as Bella's mirror image both opens and closes the scene - suggests a series of doublings quickly set in motion: the gentle, mothering Bella ofthe bedroom scene is doubled by the violently cursing, spoiled, and threatening Isabella, whose character is revealed the moment she steps out of her fortress-style house and begins to deal with her 'boys' - her criminal gang. Other doublings, and doubling of doublings, punctuate the film: the vulnerable country boy IK is doubled by his fallen city slicker (and philandering) persona Ike, and further doubled when we discover at the film's end that Ikechukwu is shadowed by a secret identity Enyinneya - buried by his father when IK was abandoned as an infant. Bella/Isabella too has a buried past and a name - Adaobi - left back at the village. Spaces and figures conventionally

Below Deadly A/fair (1995)

conveyed as opposites in popular representations are instead shown as uncanny doubles: the urban and rural spaces that the film switches between tend to mirror rather than contrast each other; the poverty and struggle of village life is simply repeated when IK gets to Lagos. Similarly, Isabella's figure as the controlling, dangerous woman and sexual predator, rather than being a patently misogynistic take on the femme fatale, is complexly doubled rather than simply corrected by an opposite, upstanding moral figure. Isabella's powerful 'matriarchal' force is counterbalanced by an equally problematic patriarchal figure: Bola's avenging father Chief Adisa (Jide Kosoko, with a non-naturalistic acting style recalling Yoruba travelling theatre). The aggressive, scene-stealing Chief Adisa is the only real match for the imperious Isabella. As both a politician and patriareh, he mirrors Isabella - an 'unoffieial' or lawless leader - by signifying the 'official' leader and figure of law. But this patriarch provides no moral corrective to Isabella's acts: like her, he bullies all he comes into eontaet with, even threatening to beat his daughter (again, just as Isabella has) as she lies wounded in a hospital bed.'^^ Finally, the very strueture and Oedipal plot of Ejiro's video film suggests a kind of mirror imaging: opening and reaehing its elimax at Isabella's imposing white house, with lovers implicitly coded as mother and son cruelly exposed in the end as true blood relations. IK, a satiated child who clutches a stuffed toy in the opening scene, is left in the final shot looking

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Articles Nollywood Style and behaving like a wounded infant - a grown man crying uncontrollably on witnessing his father reveal all to Isabella. In the fast-moving world of Deadly Affair, scams are rife and affections easily bought with the keys to a flashy car. As Isabella states, 'You don't get anything by merit these days, not even your life.' Nothing is solid or reliable, nothing is what it seems. It is only when the false appearance is peeled back - in part through complex narrative layers that include disruptive passages of lengthy exposition, digressive ad-libbing, and numerous flashbacks - that the truth is revealed. Even then, questions remain unanswered (for example, Isabella claims she was tricked into abandoning her son and fleeing to Lagos by her friend Alpho, but this is one of the few plot points not confirmed through a flashback image, so she may be deceiving right to the very end). Is there a 'message' at the heart of this film? Perhaps it is that tragedy is not an exception, but part of daily life; that the pasts we attempt to escape uncannily return to haunt the present; that the city is not so far from the village as it appears, and the seeming rewards promised by urban capitalism do nothing to insulate, fulfil, or advance our characters (and by extension, they fail to advance the collective). Actions aimed solely at individual gain and the all-important naira merely are part of an ongoing cycle of corruption and moral depravity. As with Micheaux's films, when we meditate on the problem of false appearances we might also begin to consider the restricted views offered by the film apparatus and by cinematic realism itself. In this sense all of the melodrama, exaggerated acting styles, loquacious scenes, rough camerawork, and untidy editing not only point to the seams or sutures that disguise most western film productions, they reveal loose ends, create spaces for interaction and audience engagement - for Africa's 'ironic chorus' - as opposed to encouraging captive voyeurism. (Yoruba theatre, too, is marked by participation from the audience, who provide endings to famous proverbs, chant along with choruses, and so on.) As the opening scene of Nollywood Babylon - when the director lays his hands on the camera - suggests, Nollywood may appear 'rough', but this roughness is a handmade or artisan aesthetic where human agency is visible in the form itself, as opposed 68 Ifilminternational issue 6o

to the costly, machinelike products churned out by large Hollywood studios. Ejiro's movie thus exploits the limitations of the low-budget medium, creating a sense of 'being there' amidst this 'true life story' through low-tech video aesthetics, 'real' (and often uneven) sync sound, varying theatrical and nonprofessional acting styles, and real locations. For Jonathan Haynes, the Lagos of Nollywood is marked by 'a shared realism, born of location shooting and common strategies for imaging the desires and fears of the audience' (2007:131). Nollywood's 'lo-fi' or 'homemade' techniques arguably heighten perceptions of the video film's indexical nature, suggesting everyday and ordinary aspects of human encounters rather than fabricating screen illusion. Finally, as Ejiro's movie travels between a number of cultural and linguistic regions - engaging and demanding understanding of English, Igbo, Yoruba - it presents a complex image of Nigeria that refuses any impression of favouritism or 'tribalism'. Deadly A_ffair as a film experience is diverse, disruptive, and sometimes baffling, like lived experience itself.

Afterword Though offering something very different on the surface, Nollywood need not be seen as working at odds with the political and aesthetic aims handed down by African Third Cinema. Nollywood video films are in their very nature both postcolonial and commercial, having not only created a market niche for themselves, but having displaced domination by Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong films in Nigerian film markets and amongst the Nigerian diaspora. Their perspective and approach uniquely appeal to Nigerians: 'We are basically Africans, telling African stories,' states Imasuen in Nollyu/ood Babylon; he claims Nollywood is 'the voice of Africa: the answer to CNN'. Recently, Carmen McCain (2011) countered commentators such as Rob A. Aft, who in his article 'The Myth of Nollywood and the Rise of Nigerian Cinema' privileged the need for the expansion of theatrical cinema over the seemingly substandard videofilms.As McCain argues, thrilled as I am that Nigerian film-makers are now accessing higher budgets and making incursions into world cinemas, I don't think

Articles Nollywood Style there is anything inherently inferior about low budget production or the 'straight-to-DVD' system (...]. The Nollywood model is one that should be studied and learned from, not dismissed as a primitive system which is slowly evolving from video to the 'superior' form of cinema distribution first developed in the West. (McCain 2011) Indeed, coming to terms with Noll3rwood style demands nothing less than a revaluation of the hierarchical assumptions both of good taste, and of good politics, long embedded in critical cinema discourse. Contributor's details Jeffrey Geiger is a senior lecturer in film at the University of Fssex, where he founded the University's Centre for Film Studies. His publications include the co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (2005), Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the US Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011), and a forthcoming collection, Cinematicity (Edinburgh University Press).

References Acland, Charles R. (2003), Screen Traffic: Mouies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Adejunmobi, Moradewun (2007), 'Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice', Postcolonial Text, 3: 2, pp. 1-16. Adejunmobi, Moradewun (2012), 'Nollywood and New Templates for Minor Transnational Film', paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Boston, MA, 22 March. Akpan-Obong, Patience Idaraesit (2009), Information and Communication Technologies in Nigeria: Prospects and Challenges/or Development, New York: Peter Lang. Aminu, Abdulkareem Baba (2009), 'Nollywood Can Be Saved If...', interview with Mak

'Kusare, Weekly TVust [Abuja], 1 August, http:// weekly.dailytrust.eom. Accessed 15 March 2012. Barrot, Pierre (ed.) (2009), Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bowser, Pearl and Spence, Louise (2000), Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Buscombe, Edward (1981), 'Film History and the Idea of a National Cinema', Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 9/10, pp. 141-53. Carmen McCain (2011), 'On a Nollywood Myth and the Rise of Nigerian Cinema', Weekly TYust (Abuja], 16 July, http://weeklytrust.com.ng. Accessed 1 March 2012. Fanon, Frantz (1963), The Wretched o/the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York: Grove Press. Fowley, Katie (2010), 'Pieter Hugo - Nollywood', interview. Your Digital Daily (Art Section], 28 July, www.electronicbeats.net/lifestyle/art/ pieter-hugo-nollywood. Accessed 10 June 2012. Gabriel, Teshome (1989), 'Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics', in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds). Questions of Third Cinema, London: British Film Institute, pp. 53-64. Gabriel, Teshome (2009), 'Third Cinema Updated: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics and Narrative Communities' (work in progress]. Articles and Other Works, Teshome Gabriel.net, http://teshomegabriel.net/thirdcinema-updated. Accessed 15 May 2012. Gebre-Egziabher, Lucy (2006), 'Digital Filmmaking: Panacea or Scourge for Afriean Cinema', http://www.teretproduetions.com, October, pp. 1-9. Accessed 15 March 2012. Gehr, Richard (1991), 'One-man Show', American Film, 16: 5, pp. 34-40. Gramsci, Antonio (2000), 'Concept of National Popular', in David Forgacs (ed.). An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, NewYork: Schocken, pp. 364-70.

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Articles Nollywood Style Green, J. Ronald (2000), Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haynes, Jonathan (2007), 'Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films', Africa Today, 54: 2, pp. 131-50. Haynes, Jonathan (2010), 'What is to Be Done? Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos', in Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen (eds). Viewing African Film in the Tujenty-first Century, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 11-25. Haynes, Jonathan (ed.) (2000), Nigerian Video Films, Athens, OH: University Center for International Studies. Hubner, Laura (ed.) (2011), Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions o/Worth, London: Palgrave. Hugo, Pieter (2009), Nollyuiood, Munich: Prestel Verlag. Iwunze, Chinaka (2011), interview with Obi Emelonye, African Screens, January, http://www. africanscreens.com/articles/themirrorboy. Accessed 15 March 2012. Izugbara, Otutubikey (2004), 'Patriarchal Ideology and Discourses of Sexuality in Nigeria', Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Centre, http://www.arsrc.org/downloads/uhsss/ izugbara.pdf Accessed 1 March 2012. Jeancolas, Jean Pierre (1992), 'The Inexportable: , The Case of French Cinema and Radio in the I 1950s', in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds). Popular European Cinema, New York: Routledge, pp. 141^8. Kanu, Ahaoma (2010), 'Nollywood Lacks Quality', interview with Guido Huysmans, Nigerian Village Square, 3 March, http://www. nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/ahaomakanu/. Accessed 1 March 2012. Larkin, Brian (2008), Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lupo, Jonathan (2011), 'Loaded Canons: Contemporary Film Canons, Film Studies, and Film Discourse',Journal of American Culture, 34: 3, pp. 219-33.


McCain, Carmen (2011), 'Nollywood and Its Terminology Migraines', Nigeria Films, 30 July, http://www.nigeriafilms.com/news/12913/10. Accessed 10 January 2012. McCall, John C. (2007), 'The Pan-Africanism We Have: Nollywood's Invention of Africa', Film International 28, 5: 4, pp. 92-97. Mudimbe, V. Y (1988), The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order o/Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Murphy, David and Williams, Patrick (2007), Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nayar, Sheila (2009), 'Epistemic Capital: The Etiology of an "Elitist" Film Canon's Aesthetic Criteria', Post Script, 29:1, pp. 27-44. NigeriaFilms.com (2005), 'Here Comes Mr. Prolific', interview with Chico Ejiro, The Nigerian Voice, 10 April, http://www. thenigerianvoice.eom/nvnews/2101/3/. Accessed 15 January 2012. Nwapa, Flora (1981), One Is Enough, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Obinna, Chioma (2012), 'Channel Fuel Subsidy Savings into Healthcare, FG Urged', The Vanguard [Lagos], 10 April, www.vanguardngr. com/2012/04/. Accessed 15 April 2012. Okome, Onookome (2007a), 'Nollywood: Spectatorship, Audience, and the Sites of Consumption', Postcolonia! Text, 3: 2, pp. 1-21. Okome, Onookome (ed.) (2007b), 'Nollywood: Africa Writes', Film International, 5:4, 4-9. Onuzulike, Uchenna (2007), 'Nollywood: The Influence of the Nigerian Movie Industry on African Culture', The Journal of Human Communication, 10: 3, pp. 231-42. Parkinson, David (2009), 'Hooray for Nollywood?', Focus Features, 8 December, http:// focusfeatures.com/article/hooray.for. nollywood. Accessed 10 January 2012. Popoola, Kazeem (2011), 'Chico Ejiro: Mr. Prolific', Nigeria Films, 1 May, http:// nigeriafilms.com/news/11529/16/. Accessed 10 January 2012.

Articles Nollywood Style Rhines, Jesse Algeron (1996), Blacfe FilmAA/Tiite Money, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rice, Andrew (2012), 'A Scorsese in Lagos: The Making of Nigeria's Film Industry', New York Times Sunday Magazine, 23 February, pp. MM26-MM29. Sarris, Andrew (1996 [1968]), The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, Chicago; DeCapo Press. Steinglass, Matt (2002), 'When There's Too Much of a Not-Very-Good Thing', Neiu Yorfe Times, 26 May, sec. 2, p. 16. Tcheuyap, Alexie (2011), Postnationalist AJrican Cinemas, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tobechukwu, Ekeanyanwu Nnamdi (2009), 'Nollywood, New Communication Technologies and Indigenous Cultures in a Globalized World: The Nigerian Dilemma', International Journal of Social and Management Sciences, 2: 2, pp. 62-84. Ugo, Paul Ushang (2009), Youth Culture and the Struggle/or Socia! Space: The Nigerian Video Films, Ph.D. thesis. University of Alberta. Ukadike, N. Frank (2002), Questioning AJrican Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Uwah, Innocent Ebere (2009), From Rituals to Films: A Case Study qf the Visual Rhetoric o/Igbo Culture in Nollywood Films, Ph.D. thesis, Dublin City University. Uwah, Innocent Ebere (2011), 'The Representation of African Traditional Religion and Culture in Nigeria Popular Films', Politics and Religion Journal, 5:1, pp. 81-102.

(Endnotes) 1 This article (first presented at the Society for Media and Cinema Studies conference, Boston, 22 March 2012) focuses on Lagos-based production (and more generally, southern Nigerian video films), while keeping in mind that the term 'Nollywood' has problematic associations and has been contested almost

since it appeared. As Carmen McCain (2011) points out, the term Nollywood 'homogenises a diverse industry' and tends to emphasize Lagos-based English language video production, potentially eliding the importance of Yoruba and Hausa productions (the Hausa industry, based in Kano, known for twenty years as 'Kannywood'), as well as Edo filmmaking based in Benin City and that of nearby countries such as Ghana, which 'Nollywood' both as a convenient term of reference and a kind of international brand - in many ways threatens to overshadow. Attempts to displace the Nollywood moniker with 'Naijawood' to indicate an inclusive Nigerian identity while downplaying Holl5rwood associations haven't yet attained prominence. 2 See also for example Kanu (2010). 3 A dispute between the Nigerian Television Authority and its sponsors in the early-1990s saw Nigerian productions grind to a halt. See also Parkinson (2009) and Aminu (2009). 4 Quoted from panel discussion, 'Nollywood Now!', DeptfordTown Hall, London, 6 October 2010. 5 Major industry figures have established the Filmmakers Cooperative of Nigeria and set up the Quality Control Committee and the Committee for the Control of Film Releases, all aimed at improving standards. As of this writing no Nollywood film has yet been screened at major festival competitions such as Berlin, Venice, or Cannes, though Nollywood productions feature prominently at African film festivals internationally. 6 See also Onuzulike (2007), Tobechukwu (2009), and Akpan-Obong (2009). 7 Uwah argues, on the other hand, that Noll5rwood does indeed share affinities with Third Cinema's aims and aesthetics. For Uwah, 'Nollywood movies share the same Third Cinema ideologies of cultural nationalism and lived-in situational characteristics and themes that reflect people's worldviews and experiences' (2009: 68). In a related view, Paul Ushang Ugo argues that Nollywood is Africa's 'New "Third Cinema"' (2009: ii).

Articles Nollywood Style 8 Chairman of the Lagos State Medical Guild, Dr Olumuyiwa Odusote, recently placed Nigeria among the 'worst health care systems in the world' and called for immediate subsidies from Nigeria's lucrative oil industry (Obinna 2012). 9 There is disagreement about the extent to which Nollywood - in particular Lagos-based production - has declined in recent years, with film-makers such as Obi Emelonye noting that Nollywood as a DVD industry has suffered due to the proliferation of video films on television, piracy, and 'audience fatigue'. The term 'New Nigerian Cinema' has been coined to refer to Nigerian films focusing on cinematic distribution. See Iwunze (2011). Emelonye's The Mirror Boy (2011), shot in Gambia and London, enjoyed an unprecedented premiere at the Empire Leicester Square in London. 10 See the Wikipedia entry, which paraphrases Steinglass (2002).

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11 In 2012, it was announced that Zeb Ejiro was to direct a movie budgeted at $2 million. 12 Isabella's selfishness and depravity might at first suggest a misogynistic backlash against powerful female figures of Nigerian myth, such as Uhamiri, and in fiction, such as the heroine Amaka, of Flora Nwapa's groundbreaking One is Enough (1981). Amaka similarly finds fortune in Lagos and, like Isabella, is so financially powerful that she can make the highly symbolic gesture of buying her male partner a car. As Nwapa's novel exclaims, 'My God, how many men can boast of wives presenting them with raw cash to buy a . Peugeot 504?' (Nwapa 1981:18). IK's father invokes misogynist myths, warning him against deceptive women who 'will charm you and steal your money'. Isabella, however, is not a purely negative representation of female power. Her dominance of every scene in which she appears goes against Nigerian beliefs that 'a good woman must be an obedient, submissive, meek, and a humble housekeeper' (Izugbara 2004: 9); yet the 'good woman' in the film, IK's girlfriend Bola, is portrayed as weak and passive, hence hardly a positive role model. Unachukwu's strong performance further injects vitality and often dark humour into the film.

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Nollywood Style: Nigerian Movies and 'Shifting Perceptions of Worth'

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