Nigerian Video Films In Yoruba

Nigerian video films--dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes--are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry. The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video's materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.

Collectively, the essays brought together in this book represent a discursive confluence on Nollywood as a local film culture with a global character, aspiration and reach. The governing concern of the book is that texts, including film texts, are animated by a particular sociology and anthropology which gives them concrete existence and meaning. The book argues that Nollywood, the Nigerian video film text, is deeply rooted in the sub-soil of its social and cultural milieux. Nollywood is therefore, engaged in the relentless negotiation and re-negotiation of the everyday lives of the people against the backdrop of their cultural traditions, social contradictions and the politics of their ethnic/national identity, longing and belonging. The essays weave an intricate and delicate argument about the critical role of Nollywood to the idea of nationhood and the logic of its narration with implications for language, politics and culture in Africa. The book is a valuable addition to the critical discourse on the important place of film and cinema studies in national engineering processes.

Adejunmobi highlights the continuing appeal of local identities for participants in social networks where communication occurs in languages that are not mother tongues. He shows how in West Africa notions of localness & locality remain important despite the growing prominence of global languages.

This book signposts Benin (Edo) cinema as one of the vibrant new frontiers in the performing arts of Nigeria, underscoring this with critical empirical evidence. It is among the pioneering studies in this area of media production in African indigenous popular culture. In a very concrete sense, Benin cinema is a contemporary visual encyclopedia of Benin culture that can be used to consolidate the relevance of indigenous language films in Nigeria as a potential tool for national integration and international cultural diplomacy. The book interrogates the Benin-speaking audience’s reception of Benin films in Nollywood, covering both its history and its robust filmography, which is largely unexplored in present African film and media literature. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of film, theatre arts, mass communication, cultural studies, and African studies will find it an invaluable companion. Film and media studies scholars, global Nollywood practitioners, cultural archivists, and organizers of film festivals and book fairs will also find it useful.

This book is the first definitive publication on Tunde Kelani, and represents a mine of divergent scholarly approaches to understanding his authorial power. A collection of articles on the cinematic oeuvre of one of the important and finest filmmakers in Africa, it addresses diverse areas that are crucial to Kelani’s filmic corpus and African cinema. Contributors articulate Kelani’s visual crafts in detail, while providing explications on significant markers. The book offers an understanding of how Kelani’s works represent the African worldview, science, demonstrative law, politics, gender, popular culture, canonized culture and history.