Nollywood on the road - Nigeria on display (original) (raw)
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Nollywood video film’s impact on Nigerian and other African environments and cultures
This article examines how Nollywood video films impact Nigerian and other African cultures and environments by connecting an oral culture such as Nigeria quickly through the literate phase to membership in the global village. It also contributes to McLuhan’s hot–cool model by applying it to Nollywood video films, which is complex because the term ‘video film’ connotes a combination of cool (i.e., television) and hot (i.e., cinema) media. Applying the hot–cool model to Nollywood productions suggests that quick and cheap productions are likely to distort African environments and cultures negatively, unlike the well-planned and larger budget productions that are likely to be made on celluloid. Finally, this article explicates two Nollywood video films in order to ascertain how the Nigerian and other African environments and cultures are impacted in light of the complexity of hot and cool media. The article concludes that quick productions are better viewed and decoded via a cool medium, while well-planned productions are better viewed and decoded via either a hot or a cool medium.
Films and Social Realities: A Critical Reviewof Some Selected Nigerian Video Films
In the early days of transition from celluloid film format of film production to home video films, obsession for commercialism was a distincentive to representation of social reality. Thematic focus revolved around occultism, fetishism, witchcraft, sexual display, bloodiness, violence,etc. for quick returns on investment. However, democratisation of the medium of exhibition coupled with the quality control of the contents by the regulatory agencies changed the trend. Content analysis of the some selected video films reveal a symbiotic relationship between dramatisation on the screen and unfolding events in social reality. The analysis is anchored on Marxian theory of arts that narrative structure and language must reflect reality to sensitise and edify for change. Among other findings, issues explored in the films in focus that affirmed social realism include, dictatorship, corruption in governance, police and policing, moral decadence at all levels of education and drug traffiking. Foray into this hitherto neglected issues with lasting impressions gives the film an edge over literary works in documentation of social realities. The audiovisual power of the screen makes it the most potent for cultural preservation, promotion and reorientation .
IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2020
Film is one of the significant tools of communication available to human society. In Nigeria, the Nollywood which is the household name for the movie Industry in Nigeria can be described as a potential tool for the promotion of cultural identity and national development. However, there seems to be some lapses and permissiveness of undesired contents in most Nollywood films which tend to imprint negative socio-cultural images of the country in the mind of viewers. Lately, Nollywood movie producers have started looking socio-cultural themes and concepts to drive home the quest for promoting Nigeria's rich cultural heritage so as to limit the effect of globalized media contents on our socio-cultural development and national integration. This paper intends to evaluate how Nollywood movies which is the most accessible form of exhibiting Nigeria's cultural indigenous heritage, is promoting and projecting the indigenous cultural values of Nigeria to the outside world. Of consideration to this paper, was the theme of the selected
Nollywood: The Portrayal of the Nigerian Society.
Nollywood has over the years become a world phenomenon, as its movies are being sold in Ghana, Togo, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa as well as Jamaica, USA and the UK to name a few. This paper looks at the portrayal (positive and negative) of the Nigerian society by Nigerian movies and finds out that the • movie industry has not fully reflected an appropriate image of Nigeria. The pa er concludes that we (Nigerians) owe it to our country to help uplift her image, one that has been battered by our governments and Nigerians themselves. All the same, the movie business has become a template of unity, a mirror of what is not ideal and also a bad teacher of what is right.
The cover photo of Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres, taken by the author of the book, Jonathan Haynes, shows a small video shop stacked with hundreds and hundreds of unique Video Compact Discs (VCDs) with their typical full-colour jackets. Almost no single inch is left unused to pile up the incredible amount of stories and images. It would take several life times to watch them, let alone to order them according to genre, author, period or region. Indeed, in this entropy of plots, dramas and sounds, the shop does not provide a single direction or category to make the buyer's choice easier. The only 'order' we might assume is that those VCDs stacked on the highest shelves must be older than those heaped up on the floor, the latter blocking passage to the former and obstructing the possibility for an archaeology of Nollywood.
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While conducting my research on the Nigerian video industry over the past few years, I often had the impression to fi nd myself in front of an object of study that implicitly resisted defi nition. While, on the one hand, one could say that all research object challenges and resists the researcher's attempt to classify and encapsulate it in theoretically coherent discourses, in the case of the Nigerian video industry I had the feeling that discursive practices were playing a particular role. Throughout my research I in fact observed a particular tension between the way the video industry was discussed and represented, both locally and internationally, and the way the industry itself was evolving and transforming over time.
The Nigerian Film Plot : Motion without Movement
The Nigerian film industry otherwise known as Nollywood has been acknowledged to be the second largest in the world in terms of volume of production. This fact presents an interesting vista worthy of interrogation especially in regards to the quality of the films produced. It is in respect of this premise that this article examines the plot of the Nigerian film – a characteristic capable of impacting on the popularity of the film. The paper, having dwelt on what plot is, critically examines the Nigerian film plot and discovers that the Nollywood films mostly adopt the episodic structure, thereby making them to be unnecessarily long. Besides, many of the films tend to be too wordy, too chatty and over-padded, thus subjecting them to scathing criticism. The challenges of scriptwriting in this regard are examined, culminating in recommendations being made on how to improve the quality of scripts through plot construction in the teeming film culture.
Film festival as part of the cultural tourism industry is key to the development of every country that knows how to harness its potentials. It is very important that keen attention is paid to this tourism product, and its potentials exploited by the city it is domiciled in. This is why governments all over the world have keyed into and developed their tourism strategy around them. The standard of the film festivals goes a long way to determine the calibre and population of people that will attend it. This is why more efforts must be employed, especially in Nigeria, to develop the film festivals that we have to international brands that can lure more visitors into the country through the deployment of more funds and concerted marketing drive. More effort should be expended by government, especially at state levels, to support the various ethnic film industries that we have to establish their own film festivals to help boost the event tourism subsection, while providing the necessary infrastructures to aid tourism development. With these and more, film festivals will be the new brand of cultural tourism products that will position the tourism industry of Nigeria in good stead.
Which change, what change? Glamourising social misfits in selected Nigerian home movies
International Journal of English and Literature, 2014
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation with a vibrant emerging theatre culture; the home movies. Currently, Nigeria is ranked the second largest producer of films in the world. Nollywood, as the home movies industry is called, has produced films in their thousands reflecting various aspects of the Nigerian culture and tradition. Prominent amongst such preoccupations of directors and producers of Nollywood is the presentation of a class of wealthy citizens in the society who determines what happens to people in their environment. Because of this get-rich quick mania, characters are portrayed in a number of Nollywood movies that tend to encourage even the lazy to do odd jobs, including most often, ritual sacrifices to get to the socioeconomic class of people in the society. This paper attempts to look at three of such movies, their effects on, not only the Nigerian viewer (Nollywood's immediate target audience), but the globe where Nollywood currently ravages.
Repositioning Nollywood for the Promotion of Nigeria’s Cultural Diplomacy & National Security, edited by Barclays F. Ayakoroma and Dennis A. Akoh, 45–51. Ibadan, Nigeria: Kraft Books, 2015. [Google Scholar], 2015
Nollywood governs Nigerian movie productions within and outside Nigeria. However, Hollywood also produces beyond America but derived its name from America. The problem of this study is the disconnect, in terms of cultural contexts, between the Nigerian movie industry and the American movie industry, in spite of feigned superficial and nominal imitation of the latter by the former. The objective of the study is to demonstrate that Hollywood has a direct reference to a scenographic space from which it derived its name and where drama, scenography and practitioners can meet, experiment, produce and market their arts. Theatrical activities in Hollywood are however governed by the American culture. The nominal conception of Nollywood commands an imaginary sense of space which has no application to physical, cultural or natural scenography in Nigeria. From the theoretical approach of "Deconstruction" by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), with accessory contributions from the Neo-Hegelian Marxist thoughts on formalism, this study advocates intellectual dissection of artistic phenomena such as Nollywood, with a view to constructive criticism. Data were collected via non-participant observation and Key Informant techniques and analyzed through qualitative method. The study concludes that Nollywood should have deeper considerations for cultural contexts that derive more from Nigerian environment as observable in the American model which it seems to follow.