I purchased a set of graphic prints as a gift in South Africa in 2007. My brother wanted some of the prints, but not all of them and gave me back the extras. I discovered this essay inside. It was printed on a cornflower blue 2×2 inch booklet. On the cover was a picture of a girl holding a doll and on the back it read “It is joy, not poverty that kills people”. The well written piece, intermingled with strange graphics in the original, describes the complex film industry in Nigeria that grosses some $500 million per year. I decided to transcribe the text so that the essay does not disappear into a landfill. The author Brian Larkin can, according to Google, be found in academia.–Deji
Nollywood Films, by Brian Larkin
LESS THAN 10 YEARS after their introduction, video films in Nigeria have transformed the landscape of urban mass mediated culture all over Anglophone Africa. From nothing, they have become a dominant part of African media culture and in sheer numbers have made Nigeria one of the most vibrant film producing countries in the world.
Video dramas articulate everyday postcolonial urban experience and corruption, betrayal, money, crime, sex, religion, magic and love in them are the tropes by which Nigerian lives are made and unmade. An Indian writer once wrote that in Hindi films if a clock strikes, it always strikes twelve and it is this will to excess that forms the atmosphere in which these films live and breathe. It is excess born of desperation and a surfeit of desire that is rarely fulfilled. This tendency to dwell in life as it is lived at its most heightened is melodramatic but where Western films cannot cope with the intensity of melodrama and keep it at arms length through irony and stylized references, Nigerian videos take melodrama seriously, heeding its moral messages and soaking up its emotional impact.
Nigerian video films are often compared to soap operas, sometimes, to horror films, and there is a truth that in that like these genres they are aimed less at reflection and more at stimulation. [sic] At the heart of many videos, crossing genre boundaries of family dramas, political thrillers and religious films, is an aesthetics of outrage and a reliance upon shock.
In the classic film Glamour Girls (Dir. Kenneth Nnebue) a new arrival to Lagos turns up at a friend’s house to be given the gift of a prostitute to welcome him to the city. When he takes his turn in the bedroom he finds the girl is his sister, supposedly studying at university. Morris, the… of [sic] Doctor Death (Dir. Fidelis Duker), not only murders his older brother so he can take over his hospital, but becomes obsessed with seducing his brother’s widow and manages to make her cast her own children out of the house. To gain magical powers that will allow him to make his fortune, Amos, one of the main characters in Time (a Nigerian/Ghanaian co-production. Dir. Ifeanyi Onyeabor) is shown sticking a knife into the stomach of a pregnant woman he murders, disemboweling her and removing the foetus for a sacrifice. These films are less reflections on the state of society and more provocations designed to stimulate outrage. Intensity is necessary because it is through that intensity that the fundamental emotions that suffuse these works are produced. The themes of the films—corruption, betrayal, consumption, sex, are used to generate attendant emotions of horror, desire, revulsion, and anger. These are genres designed to generate effects and like the Holy Spirit they come in to take over your body, transforming it physically, producing a bodily reaction.
Photo by Peter Keller
Religion, as many have pointed out, is key to these films. In the south, explicitly religious films are Pentecostal and driven by a Pentecostal view of the world. The startlingly successful Sister Helen Ukpabio has produced a series of films purporting to reveal the ubiquitous presence of witchcraft inside Nigerian family homes. End of the Wicked portrays a grandmother in a coven with a devil, shape changing into an animal whereby she wreaks havoc in her family, destroying their lives and killing them one by one. These actions are unmotivated by the usual deadly sins of greed, jealousy or revenge but represent a generalized, inexorable evil. The only way out of this, unsurprisingly, is accepting Jesus Christ and relying upon the power of God for salvation and rescue. This is a world of great spiritual anxiety, God and the devil living cheek by jowl, the presence of both constantly manifest in everyday life.
In the Muslim north, by contrast, where Hausa films (Nigerian films made in the Hausa language) were banned for a while after the imposition of Islamic law, religion makes its force felt through its absence rather than its presence. Of course most characters in the films are Muslims, many devout, and Islam forms the warp and woof of everyday life. But religion is nowhere near the central focus it tends to be in the south and while spectacles of outrageous consumption, corruption and fraud all feature here they are usually unmoored from their association with the supernatural. It is the root of Southern videos in Pentecostalism that tacitly leads northern directors to move away from those styles and in their search for difference, they turned to a quite different form of spectacle: the song and dance sequence. Indian films have long been popular amounts Hausa and in the case of Nigeria the move toward indian film genres of romance, singing and dancing, is northern and Muslim.
In Wasila (Dir. Isaq B. Ishaq) one of the most famous song sequences in Hausa films comes as a young woman describes to her friends how in love she is with her husband. The narrative is interrupted as we cut to a rooftop in Kaduna and Wasila (our heroine) dances with her lover Jamilu singing a duet, synchronizing periodically with the backing singers. Because of the prevalence of songs, Hausa films have spawned a boom in the Hausa music industry as cassettes are released in advance of the film to gain publicity. Wasila ends with a song, this time a lament after Jamilu has divorced Wasila for her brief flirtation with an old flame. One song is pure expression of love, the other a keening lament of loss. While the emotions may differ from the terror and shock of Southern films, emotional intensity remains, as does the ever-present theme of betrayal that unites political films with family melodramas with horror videos. In this insecure world where one must rely on others to get anywhere or even just to cope, it is precisely those others who can so often betray you. Intimacy and treachery are linked, one producing the other.
One of the odd coincidences is that the video film boom coincided with the mass penetration of personal computers in Nigeria and the new availability of design software to generate a revolution in African graphic design. The thousands of Nigerian videos released each year and the posters that go with them have produced a new visual vernacular–a constant experimentation in photography, coloring and font design–that has permeated markets all over Africa. This design is based on a layering of visual elements to make the final image packed with information. Often there is a central image of two or three of the main characters, usually in the midst of an expression (seduction, anger, hurt). Above smaller pictures are superimposed minor characters, and underneath the main image (often integrated into the film’s title) the stars are again shown in a different situation. The intent is to squeeze in narrative moments from the film, each conveying a particular theme. The colored background typically begins in one color and then shifts as the eye progresses from top to bottom. Title design, a key element in conveying the drama of the film, is one of the richest sites of experimentation, with dramatic fonts intertwined with images from the film to build the sense of drama.
Mortal Sin (dir. Zeb Ejiro) tells the story of a wife who chafes against the domineering control of her husband, a rich but impotent Chief [sic] who hires a man to impregnate her so they can start a family. The VCD cover shows the two main protagonists naked, gazing into each other’s eyes. To their left, a winding film strip shows smaller images of other characters (and the stars again) as individual frames. Alternating between blue and black, the background colors turn to red while the titles are gold with bright light playing across them. “Mortal” is in small font above a huge SIN with the barely dressed picture of the Chief’s wife (Ibinabo Fiberesima) superimposed over the “I”. In banks of video and VCD cassettes that line Nigerian roads and markets, in posters plastered all over urban centers, the visual overload packed into these covers transfers the excess inside the film onto the outside and across the urban landscape at large. The ubiquity of these covers makes them some of the most flamboyant and energetic forms of African graphic design permeating Nigerian society.
Southern and Northern films unite in presenting a world that is rich, cosmopolitan and corrupt and the films explore the moral failings of the elite in vivid detail. Transgression dominates and the films work by placing characters in situations where everyday moral behavior is flaunted producing a feeling of shock and an aesthetics of outrage. This is not a reflection of urban Nigeria but a refraction of it, an allegorical expression of the insecurities of our times through morality plays.
Nollywood sign photo by OpenSourceway
