Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture, and Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s gangster thriller Viva Riva! (2010) resonate more with Nollywood than politicized African film, further troubling simplistic binaries between the two forms of African screen media. The features of Nigerian moviemakers Tunde Kelani and Kunle Afolayan, which grow from and are marked by Nollywood aesthetics and modes of production, self-consciously invoke and revitalize Yoruba cultural antecedents and move in and out of film festival and academic circuits if not quite effortlessly, than with less and less resistance.8
As technologies and forms change, the divide between critics of popular video and elite African cinema has started to close, too. Several important books on African film have discussed the unparalleled significance of the local video movie phenomenon to the study and production of African film and media (Harrow 2007; Dovey 2009; Tcheuyap 2011). Tcheuyap’s Postnationalist African Cinema (2011), referencing Nollywood, illustrates that entertainment and performance have always been features of serious African cinema, even if rarely discussed by critics more concerned with history and politics. A conference at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2007 provided the opportunity for comparative analyses of the two forms and cultivated dialogue between scholars of local video and African film, and two significant publications, a special edition of the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2010) edited by Lindiwe Dovey and Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2010), a collection of essays edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph Austin, the conveners of the conference, grew from that meeting. Manthia Diawara’s African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010) combines analyses of film and video, treating them with equal attention and rigor. In Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011) Akin Adesokan situates African cultural production, including literature from Africa and the diaspora and the films of Sembene Ousmane and Tunde Kelani, along the transition from decolonization to globalization, reading across several genres to demonstrate the interpenetration of the material, the historical, and the aesthetic. These efforts have gone a long way toward bridging the divide between scholars writing about different forms of African screen media, provoking critical methods and theoretical questions attuned to the spirit of Kenneth Harrow’s (2007) call for change. And although I agree with Dovey, who argues that the opposition between local video and elite African film has been “rendered obsolete” (2010, 2), I do think we can attend to the meaningful differences among African cultural forms without falling into binary logic. Rather than elide these differences, we should probe their sources and effects. Whether subsidized or produced commercially, African screen media circulates and has value symbolically and economically, and as in all cultural forms, these different configurations of value overlap and interact. Serious African film, African popular video, and the many hybrid forms that fit neatly into neither category are enabled and constrained by different material conditions of creation, circulation, and consumption. To my mind, the study of video movies has been crucially important to African film criticism because the videos have resisted incorporation into the field’s dominant critical discourse and engendered methodologies attentive to materiality. Looking seriously at African video movies, and with critical scrutiny, has facilitated exciting new ways of defining, analyzing, and teaching many types of African screen media.
Whether adopting the theoretical language of Marxism, feminism, cultural nationalism, or psychoanalysis, critics of African film, in the main, have practiced what Julianne Burton (1997) has called an immanent criticism, a critical methodology that locates meaning within the world of the film text. Typically, in order to amplify the African film’s political message, the critic positions herself beside the film text, carrying out a formalist analysis of the text or describing its explicit content. Even when the critic sets out to engage history, that history is understood to be located and made present in the film. This methodology has functioned primarily to facilitate African cinema’s founding objective, which, as Harrow explains, was to be “a genuine expression answering the needs of the people through a cinema of struggle and cultural representation” (2007, 42). Yet, immanent criticism, as Burton convincing shows, abstracts and reifies the film text, sealing it off from the “dynamic historical and social forces” (1997, 167) it is intended to transform. A committed intellectual, Burton sets out to reroute politicized critical practice as it applies to oppositional filmmaking. In particular, she calls for the implementation of a more “constructive and meaningful critical relationship to the tradition of oppositional filmmaking in Latin America” (1997, 167). This relationship is based on a contextual criticism, a practice that charges the critic with “attempt[ing] to demonstrate how interacting contextual factors impact upon the film text itself and the interpretation of that text at a given point of reception” (168). Though Burton addresses her critique to politicized critics and has developed this methodology for Latin American oppositional filmmaking, her intervention inspires the method adopted in this book about African video movies. Contextual criticism attempts to account for the fluidity and complexity of context, which Burton describes as “a mutually influential dynamic between the film product, the organizational structure in which it is produced, the organizational structure in which it is consumed, and the larger social context” (Burton 1997, 170). As practiced here, contextual criticism posits a dialectical relationship between the cultural form and its many contexts and investigates how those contexts shape the text and how the text affects its context. Far from abandoning close reading, it couples that reading with the investigation of the materiality and social life of the video-text. An inherently interdisciplinary method, it recognizes that meaning is contingent and variable, constructed by the text’s modes of production and consumption and the dynamic circuits it migrates along.
Whereas the critical discourse of politicized African cinema has privileged the film-text, what have yet to be fully accounted for in the scholarship on popular video movies are their formal properties and aesthetics. This is not to discount or diminish the importance of Birgit Meyer’s provocative analyses of Pentecostal modernity or Brian Larkin’s brilliant discussion of the aesthetics of astonishment that inflect Nigerian videos. Nor do I want to ignore Esi Sutherland-Addy’s article in which she describes the affiliations shared by video movies and West African oral forms. Still, much more attention needs to be paid to the videos as texts, to the narrative conventions and generic modes they deploy, to the anxieties they seek to quell, and to the spectatorial processes they put in motion. This book brings the insights of literary and film analysis to bear on a range of video movies. Close readings of select video features highlight the ambivalent significations produced by Ghanaian movies amid profound material and ideological transformation and investigate how Ghanaian video reconstitutes, even as it is complicit with, the grand narratives of modernity and globalization.
The booming commercial video industries in Ghana and Nigeria, which produce movies meant first and foremost to entertain, have brought pleasure into visibility as a crucial dimension of analysis. Early scholarship on video movies, drawing on the explanations offered by the videomakers themselves, explained their appeal as representational. Video movies presented Ghanaian and Nigerian audiences with characters who looked and talked like them and with stories that were familiar. Meyer explains that Ghanaian popular video “was born out of people’s desire to see their own culture mediated through a television or cinema screen” (1999, 98). Recent writing has associated the appeal of the movies with not only their content, but their function, as well. Adesokan offers that the lavish displays presented by Nollywood domestic dramas fulfill “a mass desire for wealth and power” (2004, 191), and Larkin (2008) has associated the appeal of Nigerian videos with their capacity to express and imaginatively contain the vulnerabilities and desires associated with everyday life in the African postcolony. Moradewun Adejunmobi (2010) has considered the transnational reach of African popular movies to audiences outside the countries where the movies are made and has theorized the specific types of identification audiences find in Nollywood movies and the various pleasures spectators across Africa and the diaspora, from a variety of places and backgrounds, derive from watching them. Adejunmobi uses the term “phenomenological proximity” to capture this transnational appeal. She explains, “Nollywood films in English are able to generate audiences in diverse locations in Africa because they present recognizable struggles, they appeal to widespread fears and familiar aspirations” (Adejunmobi 2010, 111). Audiences identify with the hardships that drive characters to corrupt and immoral acts, and they admire the lifestyles achieved through illicit means. Both Adejunmobi (2010) and Larkin (2008) associate the appeal of videos with their adoption