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FILM COMMENT
March / April 2004
OLAF'S WORLD: NIGERIAN VIDEOFILM CULTURE
A homegrown hybrid cinema of outrageous schlock From Africa's most populous nation
by Olaf Möller
Above: The Land Belongs to the Gods
The form's origins lie in the Seventies, when Nigeria was struggling to define an autonomous film culture. The major auteur from this period was the versatile Yoruba Ola Balogun, a graduate of the IDHEC film school in Paris, who tried his hand at a variety of approaches, from populist and genre work to art cinema. He also experimented with making films in some of Nigeria's main dialects (Yoruba and Igbo), but he discovered that for a film to have a wider appeal it had to be dubbed (widespread illiteracy precluded subtitling, though today it's occasionally done with important works to expand the viewership) and couldn't be too specific to any of Nigeria's subnational cultures. Balogun took several unsuccessful stabs at creating crossover films by tackling "larger" subjects, such as a Nigerian's search for his family history in Brazil in Black Goddess (A Deusa negra, 78), or a group of African freedom fighters struggling against colonial oppression in Cry Freedom (80).
Balogun's first major success was Ajani Ogun (75), based on a popular Yoruba traveling-theater piece by Duro Ladibo. Other major traveling-theater producers (usually writer-director-actor-entrepreneurs), like Hubert Ogunde and Ade Folayan (aka Ada Love), followed his lead, and a Yoruba traveling-theater film culture blossomed. The subsequent success of Balogun's witchcraft thriller Aiye (79), based on a play by Ogunde, transformed this emerging cinema by spawning a whole new horror subgenre. (Today, almost all videofilms contain horror elements, some of them extremely graphic. In this cinematic universe, humans and otherworldly beings actively consort with one another.) Yoruba traveling theater adapted. Some producers began incorporating film and, later, video into their shows, occasionally with spectacle-laden SPFX finales. They also diversified their work by realizing it in multiple media - as stage productions, TV series, and movies, first on 35mm, then on 16mm, and eventually on video. Yoruba traveling-theater audiovisual culture is the missing link between Nigerian cinema's celluloid era and today's videofilm culture.
Balogun and other directors from that period faced one big final problem - distribution. Filmmakers usually had to self-produce and -distribute, and a real network for the presentation of Nigerian films never developed. In some ways, this meant that it made more sense to produce films on a regional rather than national basis. It's not surprising that the videofilm industry was created mainly by distributors, who saw the commercial potential and organized their filmmaking resources accordingly. The widespread street violence and curfews of the Eighties had already made cinema-going virtually impossible, and watching tapes at home was a safe way to spend the evening. Moreover, a local-theater video culture had already been established, featuring taped Haussa drama-group performances and short comic Igbo sketches, a kind of AV spin-off from Onitsha market literature, the other important indigenous influence on Nigerian videofilm culture.
Yoruba traveling-theater cinema is but one genre or idiom among many. In the celluloid era, there were two main film-producing cultures: the Yoruba in the south, where the emphasis was on popular cinema, and the Haussa in the north (particularly filmmaker Adamu Halilu), with its more art-house-oriented, semi-spiritual cinema attempting to reflect Islamic beliefs. In the videofilm era, the Igbo became the industry's main players, by not only creating an Igbo cinema but also controlling a large part of the English-language industry as well as parts of the Yoruba business. Tapes and home entertainment for the whole family suited cultural preferences, family values, and the Igbo work ethic. While the Yoruba still stick very much to traveling-theater culture, the Igbo take their cue from Hollywood genre material, and the Haussa, in many ways a culture apart, from Bollywood weepies.
Combining elements of traveling-theater film, telenovellas, Bollywood, Hong Kong, and Nigerian theater and TV (with their professionally trained actors), videofilms are strange and fascinating hybrids. In a sense, even more than Bollywood films, they're an open form, an organism capable of incorporating anything interesting that comes its way while also transforming everything it touches. Even Kelani's most sophisticated projects, as well as those of videofilmmakers like Zeb Ejiro, Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin, and Tade Odigan, are filled with elements that work against each other. As a result, narrative rhythm is often erratic, acting styles are mismatched (old-school shtick collides with academy-trained technique), and the films seem to encompass multiple worlds at the same time.
If you're ready for something like nothing you've seen before, and are prepared to set aside your preconceptions about what constitutes cinema and view the world through a different lens, then get onboard. Here's the African experience in all its violent contradictions: corrupt cops paying a visit to a witch doctor in a BMW, curses that can turn a woman into a vagina dentata, jolly jesters and born-again Christians, occasionally all-singing, all-dancing. It's sheer invention, born of utter poverty, from people desperate to tell themselves stories, to forge a cinema culture of their own, like the one they know from TV or video - but rooted in their own experience. - Olaf Möller
© 2004 by Olaf Möller
