Nollywood: Spectatorship, Audience and the Sites of Consumption

Abstract

Nollywood on the Rise Nollywood, the cinematic phenomenon that was inaugurated in Lagos, has known an unprecedented measure of success in its homeland, Nigeria. It is beginning to make its mark outside this home turf. Since the year 2000, it has gone from one international Film Festival to the other, and the gain it has made in these years has been consistent. In 2002, this author was invited to the second edition of the Festival of African and Caribbean Film, which was held in Barbados. Tunde Kelani, the veteran camera man and producer, who is also one of the icons of Nollywood, was also invited to present one of his video films, Thunderbolt. Jane Bryce, one of the organizers of this Festival, was clearly excited to formally introduce Nollywood to the audience of the island nation of Barbados for the first time. Bryce’s introduction of Nollywood to this audience rephrased what is now “common talk” in the scholarship of the video film to date. It did so from a critical and serious manner, pointing not only to the uniqueness of this medium in the visual culture of Africa but also in the world cinematic expression as a whole. Bryce’s take on Nollywood as an art and industry shows how and why Nollywood compels attention from those outside its field of operation and cultural vision, not that the industry cares for any attention from the outside. In fact, one of the characteristics that marks Nollywood as an autonomous local cinematic expression is that it looks inward and not outward, and one can accurately argue that it does so in all aspects of the production and organization of its operation. Bryce also made the point about the difference between Nollywood and the Francophone cinema of French West Africa that was the touch-bearer of what was known as the African cinema before the emergence of Nollywood. Indeed, as Bryce notes, Nollywood does not “have the opportunities for training and production financing” of Francophone cinema and does not “go to the biennial Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso.” Yet, it is remarkable in very radical ways. As a result of this success, Nollywood has been able to circumvent the problems that African Francophone filmmakers whine about and has done so successfully in the last twenty years or so. It has moved the discourse of cinematic representation away from the blame game that is obvious and somewhat compellingly