in the number of Pentecostal-charismatic churches, represents one of many “pentecostalite” expressive forms that have flourished as a result of the liberalization of the media. Video enacts a “pentecostalite style” that “recasts modernity as a Christian project” (Meyer 2004, 93), warning against the evils modernity introduces and promoting Christian discipline as the only method for warding off those evils. In Ghanaian video features Meyer finds that “pentecostal concerns merge almost naturally with melodrama as an aesthetic form” in that both assert “the need to go beyond the surface of the visible to reveal hidden reality underneath” (2004, 101). Video functions then as a technology of modern pentecostal subjectivity and vision. Meyer writes: “Moviegoers are positioned in such a way that they share the eye of God, technologically simulated by the camera. Indeed, audiences are made mimetically to share the super vision that enables God to penetrate the dark; they are addressed as viewer-believers and even as voyeurs peeping into the otherwise forbidden” (2004, 104). The appeal of video, then, involves the attainment of vision that is panoptical and voyeuristic. It is all-encompassing, secretive, and illicit.
Following the path cleared by Meyer, critics have tended to center on this one genre, variously called the occult video (Okome 2007a), the horror film (Wendl 2001, 2007) or a pentecostal expressive form (Meyer 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004). Although much of this work is compelling, its limited scope has created the false impression that Pentecostalism and its representation of occult practice figures prominently in all Ghanaian movies. Attention to the Christianity-occult binary has overshadowed the other ideological investments the videos make, the meanings they enact, and the subjectivities they produce. Certainly, Pentecostalism animates many Ghanaian movies, and even when not championed or invoked explicitly, it remains a significant discursive strand in many more. But video movies are not monolithic, nor are they controlled by one dominant way of looking or mode of narration. Unrestrained and unruly heterogeneity is a pronounced feature of videos movies. They are, in the words of James Ferguson, noisy.12 Borrowing from Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), this book advocates for and strives to employ an analytics of noise. Noise, Ferguson writes:
has its social logic—a logic that makes itself visible only if one is able at some point to set aside the search for signal, and to maintain a decent respect for the social significance of the unintelligible, for the fact that signs may produce puzzlement, unease, and uncertainty (and not only for the ethnographer) just as easily as they may produce stable and unequivocal meanings. (Ferguson 1999, 210)
Ferguson’s analytic seems well suited to video movies because, like the ethnographic sites and situations he interprets, videos are messy, crisscrossed by multiple flows of meaning. They grow out of and speak to an urban, African context not entirely dissimilar to that studied by Ferguson, and as urban cultural texts they are held together by “conflicting strands of meaning and style” (1999, 229). They resist ideological domestication (Ferguson 1999, 229) and instead invite multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction. Ferguson insists that to plot the noise of a particular scene is to listen for “multiple implied and imagined communities of meaning that only partially exist, only partially overlap and are geographically and socially dispersed” (Ferguson 1999, 227). By conceptualizing popular video as an expression of one master and overarching discourse, contained by a consistently deployed logic of surface and depth, or even assimilated to one dominant ideology, we risk silencing the flow of noise and closing off the multiplicity of potential meanings, looks, styles, and sensations produced by video features across time. Plotting the dynamic range and variable tempo of the noise, narratives, and silences of video movies also allows us to capture their incredible diversity and ideological implications, which have, so far, gone unheard.
In the emergent scholarship on African video movies, little attention has yet been given to historical change. African Video Movies and Global Desires aims to enrich our understanding of African video movies by bringing historical specificity to bear on the study of locally produced video features. Popular video is described here as a shifting and historically contingent discursive field marked by myriad ideologies, anxieties, discourses, and desires, and each chapter examines a loosely defined historical period as demarcated by significant structural changes in the industry. The chronological organization of the book outlines the changes in narrative forms and cinematic features that mark the thousands of videos produced by Ghanaian videomakers for over twenty years, and it engages the often ambivalent and contested meanings and identities produced by Ghanaian cinema at different historical moments and for different publics. It examines historical and technological change within the local, national, and transnational contexts in which video texts circulate and as it is revealed in the style and content of the video-texts.
The readings of the films and videos contained in each chapter purposefully complicate the neat and linear chronology implied by the chapter organization. Each text, much like a palimpsest, carries artifacts from that which came before, and in this way, the textual analyses present Ghana’s cinematic history more like a layering than an unfolding. Traces of the pedagogical imperative that informed the colonial film productions of the Gold Coast Film Unit inflect the most recent video features, for example, while iterations of the figure of the monstrous woman, who consumes selfishly and excessively, appear in movies made during all periods of Ghana’s film and video history. The close readings of visual texts are not intended to suggest a chronology of development from amateur to professional productions, from the visual pleasures of spectacle and astonishment to narrative containment, or from analog to digital technologies. Rather, in each period, we can see variations in aesthetics, narrative form, and modes of spectator engagement and in the anxieties, desires, subjectivities and styles reiterated across multiple video texts. These changing textual properties are analyzed as effects of the economic, technological, and political shifts indicated in each chapter division.
The first chapter of the book, “Mapping the Modern: The Gold Coast Film Unit and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation,” describes the early years of Ghana’s film history. Beginning with the earliest film screenings in the 1920s, this chapter offers an account of colonial film production in the Gold Coast and the formation of a national film company after independence. Rather than seeing the birth of a national Ghanaian cinema as a complete turning away from colonial influence, I identify the discontinuities and continuities between the feature films of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and those of the Gold Coast Film Unit. Close readings of The Boy Kumasenu (1952) and A Debut for Dede (1992) permit us to focus on the cinematic production of modernity as articulated in the late colonial and the national film. Emerging out of institutions connected through the history of colonialism, these films share a gendered language of modernity, tradition, and nation. Both films represent modernity as a relationship between space and time; the journey from village to city functions as an allegory for the evolution from African tradition to European modernity, and both films illustrate that each narrative of modernity relies, for its production, on gender difference.
Chapter 2, “Work, Women, and Worldly Wealth: Global Video Culture and the Early Years of Local Video Production,” investigates the period between roughly 1980 and 1992, when the erosion of state support for and control of filmmaking coupled with the ready availability of video technology allowed individuals situated outside of the networks of official cultural production to produce features entirely unregulated as commodities and artistic objects. The first video movies articulate the deep ambivalences generated by Ghana’s encounter with global capitalism and the concomitant shift from economies of production to consumption as illustrated in three representative examples: Zinabu (1987), Big Time (1988), and Menace (1992). In these early video movies, it is gender that structures and distinguishes these two articulations of capitalistic value.
Chapter 3, “Professional Movies and Their Global Aspirations: The Second Wave of Video Production in Ghana,” traces the shift toward more professionalized production and a more organized and regulated industry during the second phase of commercial video production in Ghana, from 1992 until around 2000. In this period, the privatization of the national film company and the emergence of several independent media outlets in Ghana parallel the privatization of cinematic space, as viewing shifts from the public cinema hall or video parlor to the privacy of watching a video or video compact disc (VCD) at home. In addition, as opportunities for employment with state institutions diminish, professionally trained