Videos in motion: Processes of Transnationalization in the Southern Nigerian Video Industry: Networks, Discourses, Aesthetics

On the ground of a three years-long multi-sited, ethnographic research conducted in Southern Nigeria, Italy and the United Kingdom, my PhD dissertation analyzes the processes of transnationalization that have affected the southern Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood) during the first decade of the 2000s, and interpret their significance in relation to the industry’s history and recent developments. Transnationalization processes have affected the industry at different levels, which include its economic and social organization, its international representation, and the narrative and aesthetic features of the films it produces. The dissertation analyzes these different levels through three separated, but interrelated, sections:
1) The Nigerian video industry has experienced a transnational success since its early stages. Thanks to the informality of Nollywood’s network of distribution, pirated copies of Nigerian videos have circulated throughout the world since the mid 90s. Informal and pirated networks of circulation made videos travel long distances and create for the industry a wide transnational audience. However, as this section argues, informal production and distribution strategies and their vulnerability to piracy progressively eroded the industry’s economy. This section then argues that, once the internal Nigerian video market has started to implode because of the excess of informality and the lack of a proper distribution framework, an important section of the industry has explicitly decided to target the transnational audience generated by the global informal circulation of Nigerian video films. New modes of production and circulation emerged, which mainly target local elites and diasporic audiences. A new wave of high budget productions saw the light. The videos’ patterns of mobility transformed and, this impacted on video films’ economic accessibility for local popular audiences.
2) The second section analyzes the way videos’ discursive circulation (that is, the way in which videos, and the video phenomenon in general, have been portrayed, discussed and analyzed both in Nigeria and elsewhere) impacted on the video industry’s transformation. As with the material and economic circulation analyzed in the first section, videos’ discursive circulation interacted with the video phenomenon in at least two ways. On the one hand it made videos travel. It made them cross boundaries and reach audiences they did not even envisaged to reach. On the other hand, it opened for the video industry a field of dynamic confrontation. Nollywood has been compared to other global film industries (such as Bollywood and Hollywood), and it has been criticized for its low production quality standards. The video phenomenon has been celebrated for some of its achievement, and mocked for some of its weaknesses. This complex interaction with the global cinema arena has produced numerous effects on the video industry. Videos entrepreneurs reacted to criticism and engaged into active processes of transformation aimed at making the video industry reach international production quality standards, and escape the marginal position within which much of the mentioned discursive constructions positioned it.
3) The third section looks at videos’ aesthetics and narrative structures. The transnational mobility of the videos impacted on them in multiple ways. On the one hand, as a result of the encounter of both transnational and local aesthetic and narrative aspects, videos developed a particular aesthetic and narrative openness which made them able to address dispersed audiences and reconstitute them into a pan-African public. Through their specific film language, contents, and forms of address videos activated a debate on what it means to be African today, and shaped it around the social, cultural and historic specificities of the post-colonial, post-Structural-Adjustment era in Nigeria and, more generally, in sub-Saharan Africa. On the other hand, mobility intervened in the reformulation of videos’ narrative and aesthetic patterns. The video phenomenon has been adopted and reinterpreted by Nigerian diaporic groups in Europe and elsewhere. The specific social and economic conditions associated with the experience of living in the diaspora interacted with the videos’ production strategies and defined particular narrative and aesthetic solutions. When the Nigerian video industry entered the production crisis diasporic production companies found themselves in the position of an avant-garde in what concerns the industry’s transnational expansion: they had already experimented with economic and aesthetic solutions that could open Nigerian productions to global audiences. As a result, they became the bridge able to connect the Nigerian video film industry to transnational, non-African audiences.