African Culture and film analysis
THE GROUNDS OF CIRCULATION: RETHINKING AFRICAN FILM AND MEDIA
Brian Larkin
Karthala | « Politique africaine »
2019/1 n° 153 | pages 105 à 126 ISSN 0244-7827 DOI 10.3917/polaf.153.0105
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Politique africaine n° 153 • 2019/1 • p. 105-126 105 Le Dossier
Brian Larkin
The Grounds of Circulation: Rethinking African Film and Media
The aesthetic form and financial infrastructures of African popular film has transformed in recent years leading to a revision of the paradigms for thinking African screen media. This paper assesses that rethinking. It examines three things. First, I argue the analysis of the technical, financial, and institutional infrastructures of film has a longer history in studies of African screen media and is, perhaps, one of its most innovative aspects. Second, I expand analyses beyond the dichotomy between traditional African cinema and popular film to take in colonial and postcolonial educational cinemas, the historical and continuing presence of foreign films (U.S., Indian, French, Chinese), and emergent art-world, gallery cinemas. These have all generated rich scholarly debate but are often segregated from each other. I argue we can fruitfully analyse them as part of a single cinematic ecology. Third, I turn from a general discussion of infrastructures of distribution and exhibition to a more narrow focus on “new Nollywood” cinema in Nigeria. I re-examine recent debates about the political effects of these new infrastructures of production and exhibition and their supposed complicity with contemporary neo-liberalism.
In both film production and the scholarly analyses of African screen media there has been a recognition that something has fundamentally changed. The mode of productive forces has shifted, the aesthetic forms they produce are different, and the technical, financial and institutional infrastructures that organize film production are not reproducing themselves but are in the midst of a deep transformation. The task for scholars has been how to think this change and the split between these new forces and older forms of African popular cinema. For Haynes and Jedlowski in this volume, for Adejunmobi, and others, the older paradigms for thinking and writing film and media no longer hold, and we need a new critical language to address this transfor- mation. This is one that moves away from the older militant manifestoes of African cinema as well as the concepts of popular culture that replaced them and which are now, in Jedlowski’s argument “at least partially obsolete”.
I want to address three issues in this article. First, both scholars and filmmakers examining recent changes in popular cinemas have focused on
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the technical and financial infrastructures of distribution that undergird these changes. They argue that these infrastructures organize and delimit what African film and media are – aesthetically, socially, politically. This has been a preoccupation of my own research – particularly around the emergence of video1 – but recent scholarship has pushed this approach farther analyzing the new digital infrastructures that undergird practices of distribution2. Moreover, this focus on distribution has been augmented as scholars have begun to analyze film festivals and biennials as infrastructural nodes that control (and mediate) forms of cultural production3. Overall, this is a focus on the material and cultural infrastructures that support and transmit media rather than on the texts themselves and reveals how these systems exert cultural and political force and are not simply neutral means of moving media around. I focus on these processes but, as will become clear, I argue this is not new. I want to return to the founding of African cinema at the moment of high nationalism to see how these issues were central to the definition of African cinema as a technical and discursive object. African film and media have a peculiar ontology because filmmakers producing them and scholars analyzing them have always focused beyond the film text itself and paid attention to how that text exists within a broader technical, economic, and political environment. This has been a focus in recent turns within film
1. B. Larkin, « Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Media and the Infrastructure of Piracy in Nigeria », Public Culture, vol. 16, n° 2, 2004, p. 289-314 ; Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham, Duke University Press, 2008 ; « Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria », in J. Haynes (dir.), Nigerian Video Film. Revised and Expanded Edition, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000, p. 209-242. 2. Jedlowski cites much of this work in the introduction. See the Haynes essay in this volume and: M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities in Old and New Nollywood », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, 2015, p. 31-53 ; « Streaming Quality, Streaming Media », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), A Companion to African Cinema, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 2019, p. 219-243 ; C. Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013 ; J. Haynes, « Between the Informal Sector and Transnational Capitalism: Transformations of Nollywood », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), A Companion to African Cinema, op. cit., p. 244-268 ; A. Jedlowski, « African Media and the Corporate Takeover: Video Film Circulation in the Age of Neoliberal Transformations », African Affairs, vol. 116, n° 465, 2017, p. 671-691 ; C. Ryan, « New Nollywood: A Sketch of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, 2015, p. 55-76 ; J. L. Miller, Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Videofilm Industry, Londres, British Film Institute, 2016 ; N. A. Tsika, Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015. See also R. Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Londres, British Film Institute, 2012. 3. On festivals the major contribution here is L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Biennials as an infrastructure for the art market and art film is receiving increasing attention. Y. Konaté et R. G. Elliot (trad.), « Dak’Art: The Making of Pan- Africanism and the Contemporary », Art in Translation, vol. 5, n° 4, 2013, p. 487-529. Dovey also discusses this turn toward biennials in her book.
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and media studies but its long history in the subcontinent is, perhaps, one of the most innovative aspects of African screen media studies.
Second, in drawing out this history I want to move beyond normative binaries that have organized polemics between (a largely francophone) African cinema, what I am going to refer to as festival cinema4, and what I will term popular cinema. This refers to the cinemas that emerged in Ghana and Nigeria from the 1990s on Ghannywood (Ghanaian film), Nollywood (English language Nigerian film) and Kannywood (Hausa language Nigerian film)5. In the 1990s and 2000s these two cinema practices were often at loggerheads with both scholars and filmmakers engaged in polemics though this has lessened in recent years. The problem with this polemic is that it focused on differences producing reified oppositions and eliding continuities. It also operated with a restricted definition of film in Africa in that it largely ignored a much broader cinematic ecology, colonial and postcolonial mobile educational cinemas, the continuing presence of foreign film (U.S., Indian, French and Chinese films): and emergent art-world cinemas6. What made these polemics so intense is that behind them lay ambitions for the possible futures for modern African subjects in Nigeria. One was progressivist, engaged with modern artistic
4. See L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age…, op. cit. Dovey uses this term to refer to films that are outside of the mainstream, and which are more aesthetically challenging, often striving for a new film language. This is the classic definition of African cinema and the sense I will use the term in this article (M. Diawara African Cinema: Politics and Culture, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992). However, as Dovey notes, film festivals themselves are varied with many pursuing a mainstream audience while other seek a more experimental edge. The appearance of mainstream, popular Nigerian films such as Wedding Party (Kemi Adetiba, 2016) at the Toronto Film Festival, for instance, blurs this distinction. 5. Yoruba language film is decisive here, both as a precursor and driver of the emergence of Nollywood, but also as an industry in its own right. It has not been given a “…wood” suffix. 6. On educational cinema see J. Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 ; C. Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires…, op. cit. ; B. Larkin, Signal and Noise…, op. cit. ; A. Sanogo, « Colonialism, Visuality and the Cinema: Revisiting the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment », in L. Grieveson et C. McCabe (dir.). Empire and Film, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 227-245. Since the heyday of the critique of cultural imperialism there has been sustained historical and contemporary research into the central place of foreign films within the cultural life of Africans across the continent. On the popularity of Hindi cinema see: A. U. Adamu Transglobal Media Flows and African Popular Culture: Revolution and Reaction in Muslim Hausa Popular Culture, Kano, Visually Ethnographic Press, 2007 ; « Currying Favour: Eastern Media Influences and the Hausa Video Film », Film International, vol. 28, n° 4, 2007, p. 77-89 ; L. Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2018 ; M. Fugelsang, Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Swahili Coast, Stockholm, Studies in Social Anthropology, 1994 ; M. Krings, African Appropriations: Cultural Difference Mimesis, and Media, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015 ; B. Larkin, « Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities », Africa, vol. 67, n° 3, 1997, p. 406-440. On cowboy films see F. De Boeck et M. Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, Gand, Ludion Press, 2004 ; C. D. Gondola, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence and Masculinity, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2016 ; on gangster films see R. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, Londres/New York, Routledge, 1994.
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currents from elsewhere, artistically and intellectually modernist, socially and intellectually elite. The other emerged from the crucible of the popular and the informal, representing what Ashis Nandy refers to as the “unintended city” that overwhelmed the modernist imagination and underwent an “incomplete modernization”. This distinction is real, so far as it goes. But it asserts fixed categories when in fact there is much movement between them, and it presumes the centrality of these two cinemas at the expense of the educational, the foreign and the art-world, each of which mobilizes their own forms of ambition, identity and desire. To understand the cinematic as a cultural and political form in Africa it is necessary to take this broader ecology into account.
Third, I turn from this more general discussion of infrastructures of distribution and exhibition in the context of film and media history in Africa to a more narrow focus on “new Nollywood” cinema in Nigeria. In particular, I comment on recent discussion on the production of technically sophisticated, “international standard” images in New Nollywood films and the complicity of these images with contemporary neo-liberalism7. The material nature of the image – whether low or high quality –is not simply an aesthetic choice by filmmakers but is the technical aftereffect of systems of distribution. And as those systems have become the focus of aesthetic and political debate so too has the status of the image and its quality. Earlier popular cinema was seen to be technically poor, but because it was distributed broadly to all strata of society and because it addressed tensions at the heart of everyday Nigerian society those poor images were, for some, a material embodiment of their egalitarianism and accessibility. New Nollywood cinema, by contrast, is technically superior, but its high resolution, sophisticated lighting and clear sound is seen, again, by some, as the formal expression of a cinema oriented to elites. Borrowing from urban studies, we can see this as a kind of enclave cinema, a gated reserve that provides a way of living that matches a global middle class (“international standard”) but only by excluding the popular classes. There is much to agree with in this depiction. However, I wish push against it by taking seriously the ambition for technical excellence and narrative sophistication as a political as well as a cultural goal. The desire for technical excellence needs to be understood as something more than a formal expression of neo-liberal capital.
7. I use this term as it is the one mobilized by scholars in their discussion of new Nollywood. It is a large and capacious concept and different scholars focus on differing aspects. In the main, it refers to the privatization of previously state-run institutions in the aftermath of structural adjustment programs; the avocation of new forms of consumption and spectacle, and the growing penetration of international private capital into domains once controlled by the state and the (local) market and an increased governmental focus on the self at the expense of the communal.
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Distinction
When Onookome Okome wrote his now classic essay “Nollywood and its Critics” (2010) he made the important point that debates around film have generated “intractable controversies” about the place of culture and society in postcolonial Nigeria8. As Okome notes, critics of Nollywood were trained in the fight against cultural imperialism and dismissed this new film form as “trashy” because of what it was – naïve, technically poor, culturally essentia- list, obsessed with images of wealth and consumption – and for what it was not – progressive, critical, aesthetically and technically complex. Because of the critique, the earliest scholarly works on Nollywood were all concerned with the same issue: how do you create a critical discourse around a popular new form that seems to show a total lack of concern for politics as such. Are these apparently apolitical films actually engaged in core political issues facing Nigerians9?
The emergence of popular cinema represented a technical revolution brought about by the small media of videocassette. As I argued at that time, the affordances of video as a technology had a profound effect. It marked a fundamentally different material base than previous histories of media in Africa (both state television and commercial cinema), bringing different sorts of actors into the film industry, innovating new structures of distribution and reshaping sites of film exhibition, giving rise to what I then termed a “video culture10”. These consequences were felt all over Nigeria but particularly in the north where women were often kept in seclusion (kulle) and largely excluded from forms of public culture. Video brought films into the home which now became the dominant site for film exhibition transforming gendered relations of viewing in the north.
The introduction of new technologies is often a time of great instability as their practical operations, semiotic economies, cultural and political effects are not yet fixed but in process. This is why they are often accompanied by anxiety
8. O. Okome, « Nollywood and its Critics », in M. Saul et R. A. Austen (dir), Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2010, p. 26-41. 9. The important works in this regard are: M. Adejunmobi, « English and the Audience of an African Popular Culture: The Case of Nigerian Video Films », Cultural Critique, n° 50, 2002, p. 74-103 ; J. Haynes et O. Okome, « Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films », in J. Haynes (dir.), Nigerian Video Film…, op. cit., p. 51-88 ; J. Haynes, « Introduction », in J. Haynes (dir.), Nigerian Video Film…, op. cit., p. 1-36 ; J. Haynes, « Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films », African Affairs, vol. 105, n° 421, 2006, p. 511-533 ; O. Okome, « Nollywood and its Critics », art. cité. 10. B. Larkin, « Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video… », art. cité. See also the classic works on this topic: P. Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1993 ; A. Sreberny-Mohammadi et Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture and the Iranian Revolution, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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and intense cultural debate as individuals and societies seek to define and fix what these technologies are and fear for what they might do11. It is this debate Okome tracks. Scholars, filmmakers, censors, government officials, clerics all collided over what the political and cultural consequences of popular cinema would be12. The result of these debates was that the discussion of film became oriented around difference and opposition. As scholars, we sought to identify what was new in popular cinema, technically, financially and aesthetically, and contrasted these innovations with the cinema that came before. And because of the polemical nature of these debates this difference was frequently narrated as opposition. This is helpful in establishing key differences between media but can be reductive, missing out on the broader ecology in which media exist.
In the last seven years, as Haynes and Jedlowski note, there has again been a technical and economic transformation in African screen media. I do not want to go into the details of this transformation as they are well described in this journal and elsewhere13. But where previously the opposition (or “culture wars14”) was between festival and popular cinemas, recent transformations mean the binary is now between what is glossed as “old” and “new” Nollywood. This is again based on a technological transformation (the emergence of digital technologies) that in turn involves new forms of financing, distribution, exhibition and audience. And once again scholars have focused on establishing what is distinct about this new cinema emphasizing its alterity from what went before15 but unlike before, instead of championing
11. L. Gitelman et G. Pingree (dir.). New Media 1740-1915, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004 ; B. Larkin, Signal and Noise…, op. cit., p. 3. 12. This debate was particularly intense in the north of Nigeria where the emergence of popular film brought filmmakers into conflict with Islamic clerics seeking to censor films under the rubric of Islamic law. See A. U. Adamu, « Islam, Hausa Culture, and Censorship in Northern Nigerian Video Film », in M. Saul et R. A. Austen (dir), Viewing African Cinema…, op. cit., p. 63-73 ; M. Ibrahim, Sharia Implementation, Filmmaking, and Muslim Discourses: Analysis of Contestations and Negotiations between Ulama and Kannywood Filmmakers in Northern Nigeria, Thèse de doctorat, Bayreuth, Université de Bayreuth ; M. Krings, African Appropriations…, op. cit. ; C. McCain, « Nollywood, Kannywood, and a Decade of Hausa Film Censorship in Nigeria », in D. Biltereyst et R. Vande Winkel (dir.), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 223-240. 13. See footnote 2. 14. Voir M. Saul et R. A. Austen, « Introduction », in M. Saul et R. A. Austen (dir), Viewing African Cinema…, op. cit., p. 3. 15. This is the dominant tendency in all writing on the topic. However, M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities… », art. cité ; A. Jedlowski, « African Media and the Corporate Takeover… », art. cité ; and N. A. Tsika, « Nollywood Chronicles: Migrant Archives, Media Archeology and the Itineraries of Taste », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), A Companion to African Cinema, op. cit., p. 269-290, all try to query this opposition drawing out continuities between these two cinemas as well.
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the new cinema, scholars of new Nollywood have been far more wary of the political economic and cultural consequences of these changes.
This is because many scholars identify new Nollywood with a form of neoliberalization. Adejunmobi sees the convergence of television serials and new Nollywood as productive of a new governmental subject organized around consumption, a global orientation, the regulation of self and society through individual choice rather than broader social action. “New Nollywood films”, she argues, “embrace the ethos of neoliberal orthodoxy more fully than Old Nollywood films16.” Jedlowski sees the financing for these films as a “corporate take-over” of cinema. Old Nollywood or “Asaba” films could and can be made by almost anyone and distributed to everyone quickly and cheaply through open-air markets whereas streaming services and multiplex cinemas are seen to effectively monopolize what was previously a more democratized system of production and distribution. Because they rely upon venture capital, bank financing and major capital investment, they also represent the incursion of the formal financial sector into what was very much an informal system17. If the melodramatic spectacle of old Nollywood was a critical commentary on the forms of precarity and wealth that marks modern Africa, new Nollywood is seen to be a direct expression of capital itself. New Nollywood, Connor Ryan argues, “serves more and more as a direct demonstration of capitalism’s production of social life in the city18”. While all these scholars are aware of the positive potential of these changes, overall, they betray deep anxiety that these changes represent a form of loss. The distorted images and sounds of old Nollywood were the technical aftereffect of a distribution system that allowed these images to reach the mass of people. Democratization, it could be said, left its material trace on the image. Now technical excellence can be maintained but only by enclaving images onto screens and platforms that allow for quality control but whose expense keeps those images beyond the means of many Nigerians.
The irony here is that in developing a sophisticated critique of recent changes, scholars who defended popular cinemas from attack by critics of cultural imperialism now read far more like the latter. The early critique of Nollywood by theorists of African cinema was that it was commercial and apolitical, complicit with forms of capital, depicting a world of wealth and luxury unrelated to the everyday life of most Nigerians. Now scholars are anxious that new Nollywood is commercial and apolitical, complicit
16. M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities… », art. cité, p. 41. 17. A. Jedlowski, « African Media and the Corporate Takeover… », art. cité ; J. Haynes, « Between the Informal Sector… », art. cité ; J. L. Miller, Nollywood Central…, op. cit. 18. C. Ryan, « New Nollywood… », art. cité, p. 65.
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with forms of neo-liberal capital, depicting a world of wealth and luxury unrelated to the everyday life of most Nigerians. The critical discourse around African cinema emerged from the broader analysis of neocolonialism and underdevelopment focusing not just on texts but on the place of cinema in a broader political economy. Now it is precisely the relation of cinema to capital that is at the forefront of this new literature. What was once framed as two opposed, if not warring, aesthetic and scholarly traditions, now occupy similar terrain
Connection
In narrating a history of film in Africa for this issue Jedlowski provides a short conceptual overview familiar to all of us who work in this realm. “In early post-independent Africa the economy of screen media production and dissemination was mostly controlled by local governments and foreign donors” producing a cinema that was high quality but “mostly oriented toward international audiences rather than larger, Africa-based publics”. This was replaced by “a more dynamic ecosystem of small entrepreneurs who produced media contents with limited budgets and low-end technologies for local distribution via mainly informal networks19”. Jedlowski identifies two different forms of criticism associated with these two cinemas. The for- mer was based on “politically-militant Third Cinema theory” and the latter on the study of postcolonial urban popular cultures drawn, he says, from anthropology. For Austen and Saul this distinction is one between film studies students who use “the classic cinema-studies method of closely analyzing art films as finished texts” versus “the scrutiny of social scientists” (mainly anthropologists) or, in humanities faculties, of “media studies” and “cultural studies specialists20”.
While this history is correct it only pertains to certain cinemas while in fact there is a more capacious history of film in Africa which has received considerable analysis in recent years and which we should bring into this story. These cinemas are part of the broader ecology in which festival and popular cinemas (old and new) grow. The history of African film is sometimes narrated as a linear sequence: colonial propaganda documentaries are superseded by the rise of festival cinema, which in turn gave way to the explosion of popular cinemas that are now giving way to the rise of new Nollywood and its cousins. However, festival cinema never eradicated the educational, propaganda
19. See Jedlowski in this issue. 20. M. Saul et R. A. Austen, « Introduction », art. cité, p. 2.
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impulse that organized colonial and early nationalist documentaries as the continued attempt by NGOs and foreign states to use Nollywood, Kannywood, and Riverwood (Kenyan popular cinema) to spread “messages” attests to. Equally, popular cinema never eradicated the auteurist impulse as Aboubakar Sanogo21 has made abundantly clear (he notes that the same transformations in digital infrastructures that have roiled popular cinema have also energized festival filmmaking). And new Nollywood has not replaced the grassroots cinema of old Nollywood. Rather, all of these cinemas continue to co-exist. Spectators oscillate between watching Indian and Hausa films, old and new Nollywood, American and Hong Kong films. Popular filmmakers see the festival circuit as a potential world they aspire to as well as an aesthetic and financial structure to avoid and are happy to move between the two. Neither are the lines of critical analysis so sharply drawn. It is true that studies of festival cinema are typified as textualist and, indeed, this is an important part of the study of African film and media. But it is only one method of analysis. Because of its roots in political economy, African filmmakers and scholars always addressed economic and technical structures outside of the text as well. It is also the case that the materialist turn in scholarship generally – new materialism, actor-network theory, archaeology of media, posthumanism – has shifted analysis away from texts per se and toward the material structures that support and traffic them. But this is a tradition of analysis that emerges from within both the humanities and social sciences. Any simple division between a textualist humanities and sociological social science is almost immediately undermined.
The Grounds of Circulation
One of the most interesting aspects of recent research in African screen media has been the attention paid to the infrastructures that make possible and ground the circulation of media22. This is clearest in the analysis of new multiplexes, streaming services and satellite televisions but the consequence of this has been to throw older structures of distribution into relief. These were organized around open air markets – Kof’ar Wambai (Hausa film), Idumota, Alaba (Nollywood film) – and embedded in the sorts of informal economic and social structures that have been widely studied in African
21. A. Sanogo, « Certain Tendencies in Auteurist Film Practices in Africa », Cinema Journal, vol. 54, n° 2, 2015, p. 140-149. 22. See note 2. See also R. Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema…, op. cit. ; R. Lobato et J. Thomas, The Informal Media Economy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2015.
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urbanism23. This research has been augmented by recent scholarship exami- ning the infrastructural role festivals play in regulating and mediating the circulation of festival films24 and in the art world by the increasing critical focus on biennials. All of these – markets, film festivals, biennials – comprise the infrastructure allowing images to circulate and which draw together technical, economic, institutional and cultural forces to make the movement of images possible.
My earliest work examined the circulation of Indian film to Nigeria and was part of a broader examination of how the flow of images produced by globalization affected cultural and social life25. I had always been interested in the materiality of the technologies that carried cultural forms as well as the forms themselves but became interested in grounding the abstract notion of “flow”. Things do not “flow” in any open-ended sense. They can only move from point A to point B because an infrastructure allows them to do so and, as it does, it prevents them moving to points C or D. These infrastructures are not neutral but they operate upon the objects they traffic. In the case of Nigeria in the 1990s, the vast majority of image products were only available through pirate videos which were copies of copies of copies. Mass copying leaves material traces. Not only that, but distribution relied upon technical equipment that was frequently old, faulty and in varying states of (dis)repair. As I argued previously, “Piracy imposes particular conditions on the recording, transmission, and retrieval of data. Constant copying erodes data storage, degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction” giving rise to a pirate aesthetics26. This refers to the fact that “Pirated images have a hallucinogenic quality. Detail is destroyed as realist representation fades into pulsating, pure light. Facial features are smoothed away, colors are broken down into constituent tones, and bodies fade into one another. Reproduction takes its toll, degrading the image by injecting dropouts and
23. These are all markets where the reproduction and distribution of popular film were organized: in Kano (Kof’arWambai), Lagos (Idumota, later Alaba) and, more latterly, in Asaba, Delta state. 24. L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age…, op. cit. See also T. J Bikales, From “Culture” to “Commercialization”: The Production and Packaging of an African Cinema in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, Thèse de doctorat en anthropologie, New York, New York University, 1997. 25. B. Larkin, « Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers… », art. cité ; « Bandiri Music, Globalization and Urban Experience in Nigeria », Social Text, vol. 22, n° 4, 2004, p. 91-112. On flow, see A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996 ; M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1996 ; G. Deleuze et F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987 ; P. Virilio, Speed and Politics, New York, Semiotext(e), 1987. 26. B. Larkin, « Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds… », art. cité, p. 290-291.
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bursts of fuzzy noise, breaking down dialogue into muddy, often inaudible sound27”. Distribution was not a transparent, neutral event but affected the material nature of the image itself. It made pulsating images and muddy sound the material grid through which all media were consumed.
In this, I built on work that circulation and its opposite, stasis, are activities that have to be accounted for rather than presumed. Dilip Goankar and Elizabeth Povinelli argued that things must take on form as a condition of their circulation, and those forms must conform to the channels of circulation that move them28. On a material level, for instance, for gifs to circulate widely and reach large amounts of people quickly they must use small file sizes leading to stuttering, pixelated images.MP3s, similarly, compress audio, reducing the sonic range of music and sound in order that they can be stored, transmitted and played quickly. This means the machinery we have for organizing sound is not governed by fidelity to the sonic event recorded but by the technical needs demanded by the system of storage. Sound responds to technics, not the other way around29. For media to disseminate as broadly as possible, reaching the most amount of people, they need to be able to be produced quickly and cheaply and media which do this are often of low resolution and poor quality. That poverty of image and sound is the material consequence of its circulatability and the symbolic statement of its connection to the demos30.
However, as Gaonkar and Povinelli suggest, practices of circulation rest on cultural as well as material bases. They do so by inhabiting specific forms which address and bring into being specific publics and collectives31. This is why they argue that to understand circulation we need to move beyond seeing it as an enabling matrix that makes movement possible but something that exerts its own determinative culture32. We can see this in the relations between informal marketers, multiplex cinema operators, festival programmers, and art gallery curators all of whom have sophisticated ideas of the sorts of cultural forms relevant to the publics they are addressing
27. Ibid., p. 308. 28. D. P. Gaonkar et E. A. Povinelli, « Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition », Public Culture, vol. 15, n° 3, 2003, p. 385-397. See also B. Larkin « Making Equivalence Happen: Commensuration and the Architecture of Circulation », in P. Spyer et M. Steedly (dir.), Images that Move, Santa Fe, SAR Press, 2013, p. 237-256. For an interesting analysis of material breakdown in circulation and stasis see G. Steingo, « Sound and Circulation: Immobility and Obduracy in South African Electronic Music », Ethnomusicology, vol. 24, n° 1, 2015, p. 102-123. 29. J. Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Durham, Duke University Press, 2012. 30. H. Steyerl, « In Defense of the Poor Image », The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux journal, Sternberg Press, 2009, p. 31-45. 31. K. Barber, « Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa », Africa, vol. 67, n° 3, 1996, p. 347-362. 32. They take this idea from B. Lee and E. Li Puma, « Cultures of Circulation: The Imagination of Modernity », Public Culture, vol. 14, n° 1, 2002, p. 191-213.
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and constituting. Lindiwe Dovey argues that festival programmers play a role “in producing certain kinds of African cinema” raising questions about the exclusions involved in this selection “what Arjun Appadurai resonantly calls ‘the traffic in criteria’33”. But as Jonathan Haynes (this volume) notes, informal marketers also have an acute instinct for what their audiences want and are well able to insist that films follow these formal directives in order that they will be funded and circulated. These exclusions, then, do not just happen at the high end but are present at every stage of Nigerian screen media production. Old Nollywood films have to conform to the technical, formal, and narrative requirements of multiplexes in order to be screened34. The pleasing narrative and commercial sophistication that made Wedding Party (Kemi Adetiba, 2016) a blockbuster at multiplexes might disqualify it from film festivals with more avant-garde sensibilities35. Similarly, Wangechi Mutu’s three screen animated, non-narrative video installation The End of Carrying All (2015) conforms to an art world cinematic format that allows it to be curated by Okwui Enwezor for the Venice Biennial but would make it difficult to circulate outside of the gallery space.
Asaba marketers, film house multiplex owners, festival programmers, and biennial curators are all highly sophisticated in recognizing the formal devices their specific circulatory systems demand and ensuring the products they screen conform to those technical and aesthetic formats. This dominates the selection criteria of marketers as much as it does of film festival programmers. In a fascinating interview, Chris Eneaji, the new Nollywood director, tells Carmen McCain that after he made his first critically successful film, he was sat down by veteran Nollywood director Teco Benson and bluntly told that he must choose between making films for a mass audience or making films for multiplexes because the two venues engaged different audiences with differing taste criteria. Eneaji’s film, Murder at Prime Suites (C. Eneaji 2013), was critically successful but Benson told him “It is a good story, but that’s not what Nigerians want to see… Choose. It’s either you want to make
33. L. Dovey, « Through the Eye of a Film Festival: Toward a Curatorial and Spectator-Centered Approach to the Study of African Screen Media », Cinema Journal, vol. 54, n° 2, 2015, p. 128. 34. To give an example, Daniel Oriahi, the director of Taxi Driker: Oko Ashewo (2015) was instructed by FilmOne, the production arm of Filmhouse cinemas, that his film should be kept to a 90 minutes length. This is to keep the film within an “international standard” for feature films and to distinguish it from excessively long (often multi-part) stories of old Nollywood (conversation with Oriahi, November 2017). 35. Noah Tsika demonstrates clearly how structures of distribution and exhibition affect the aesthetic organization of the text noting that the filmmaker Izu Ojukwu had to eliminate nearly 50 minutes from his film ’76 (Izu, 2016) in order for it to be shown at multiplex cinemas. Tsika refers to this as the “authoring” process of distribution and exhibition, an argument Dovey also makes. N. A. Tsika, Nollywood Stars…, op. cit., p. 283.
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money, or you make the movies that will make the name for you36”. Benson is clear that films made to fit the style of one of these structures of exhibition will not work in the other. Eneaji goes on to confirm Benson’s insight. When he finished his next film, Secret Room (2013), shot in new Nollywood style, he screened it for his family to get a sense of popular reaction, “it didn’t go more than twenty minutes and someone was asking me, ‘Can we change?’ I was depressed…37” (however the film received critical success and was later nominated for awards).
What this shows is the power of systems of distribution in “authoring” the films they traffic. And it indicates the fact that Nigeria, like most African countries, encompasses a range of filmmaking styles and taste sensibilities. This is why discussing film in terms of binaries – between festival and popular cinema or old and new Nollywood – is limited. Film in Africa, like Africans themselves, is diverse comprising differing aesthetic and cultural investments.
It is precisely this attention to the dynamics of circulation that we see in the innovative recent scholarship on multiplexes, streaming services, satellite television stations, film festivals and biennials that provide the technical infrastructures for African screen media. These transformations are not distinctive to Africa. The relationship of cinema to the multiplex and the shopping mall has been a central theme of spectatorship since the pioneering work of Anne Friedberg38 and the role of multiplexes in the “gentrification” of cinema has been analyzed extensively in Indian screen studies39. But what is distinctive is that film history in Africa – from mobile propaganda cinemas, through to auteur festival cinemas, to the emergence of a popular home video format cinema industry – has had a trajectory unlike other film histories and which, as a consequence, has included systems of distribution as a core analytic focus.
36. C. McCain « An Evolution in Nollywood, Nigeria’s New Wave: A Conversation with Chris Eneaji », Black Camera, vol. 7, n° 2, 2016, p. 210. Benson saw the old Nollywood market as more lucrative financially for directors than the far more expensive enclave cinema of new Nollywood. 37. Ibid., p. 212. 38. A Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. 39. A. Athique et D. Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure, Londres, Routledge, 2010 ; T. Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Film Industry, Durham, Duke University Press 2012 ; A. S. Rai, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009.
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The peculiar ontology of African Cinema
In 1973, Third World filmmakers from across Africa and Latin America met in Algiers in a historic congress to produce a series of resolutions defining the concept of Third World Cinema. Coming just after the formation of the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (Fepaci) in 1969 this was a collective effort of developing nations to fight against cultural imperialism by esta- blishing a progressive popular film industry. It came after the establishment of the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC, Carthage Film Festival), the first film festival of its kind in Africa and gave rise to Fespaco, the dominant film festival in West Africa. The congress was followed by two others – in Algiers in 1975 and Niamey in 1982. The aim of these congresses was to put forth a series of resolutions laying out a blueprint for a cinema in the Third World and in Africa in particular40 and their resolutions remain canonical statements about the relation between culture and decolonization.
The first sentence of the 1973 resolution on the state of cinema begins: “So called ‘underdevelopment’ is first an economic problem with repercus- sions on the social and cultural sphere41.” As a statement on cinema this is an interesting opening. The roots of nationalist African cinema lay in political economy, in the analysis of an economic system of dispossession and the role of cinema – economically and culturally – in that dispossession. “To analyse such a development” the resolution continues, “we must refer to the dialectics of capitalism on a world scale”. Political economy generates a peculiar ontology for cinema because it displaces the cinematic. Under this analysis film can never refer to either text or the physical substance of celluloid alone but is dispersed into a broader political economy – “capitalism on a world scale”. This is what I mean by its peculiar ontology, that in this lineage of critical thought film is displaced at the moment it is brought into focus. The very meeting designed to focus attention on the cinematic text incorporated the question of infrastructure into the object of African cinema and, I am arguing, set in motion a concern for the platforms that allow circulation which continues to today. James Genova has recently made a similar argument in his detailed recounting of the struggle between the first generation of African filmmakers and the French government in the origins of festival cinemas. He argues that African filmmakers at this time were not just concerned with issues of representation (though this was an important
40. This initiative merged from the formation of the formed in 1969 and inaugurated in 1970. 41. « Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, Algiers, December 5-14 1973 », Black Camera, vol. 2, n° 1, 2010, p. 156.
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focus) but with the “cinema industrial complex” as a whole42. He cites the filmmaker and theorist Haile Gerima on this: “I believe that the… right to express one’s own story is the battleground… Now I have become more realistic that films are nothing without the power of distribution, and I have become more realistic about the economic aspects of cinema43.”
The concern for the infrastructural bases of cinema can be seen in the fact the 1973 congress was broken down into three separate sections each issuing their own set of recommendations. The first examines cinema’s role in the cultural alienation of societies and the need to develop a revolutionary alternative. The second focuses on production and stresses the need “to provide revolutionary filmmakers with national cinema infrastructures44”. The third analyzes distribution and recommends the creation of a Third World Cinema Office to organize the distribution of revolutionary films from across the Third World. Genova argues that the founding figures of Fepaci – Paulin Vieyra, Med Hondo, and Ousmane Sembène – realized that without command of the material structures of cinema “any progress in the representational realm would be fleeting and reversible45”. This is why the second meeting of Fepaci (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes) in 1975 and the third in Niamey Manifesto in 1982 again reiterated the need to understand cinema in a broader capacity as comprising “the exploitation of cinema theatres, the importation of films, technical infrastructure, and training46”.
This history is provocative. It complicates easy assertions about the textualist bias of African cinema studies that is different from and opposed to, a social scientific concern for material structures. The analysis of film form remains important but at the very emergence of African cinema there was already a far more capacious idea of the cinematic which rejects these dichotomies. In his programmatic essay, “What is Cinema for Us?” the noted Mauritanian director Med Hondo excoriates the “domination” of African audiences by foreign images and affirms the ways of life they promote and
42. J. E. Genova, Cinema and Development in West Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2013. 43. Ibid., p. 8. This quote was taken from F. Pfaff, « From Africa to the Americas: Interviews with Haile Gerima (1976-2001) », in F. Pfaff (dir.), Focus on African Films, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 303-320. The struggle of Francophone filmmakers to control the infrastructural circuits of distribution was, of course, a different one from Nigerian and Ghanaian filmmakers. For the former this involved a direct engagement with the French state, who sponsored cinema production, and with cinema theater owners across West Africa. Nigerians and Ghanaians received no such support and largely avoided or were excluded from cinemas. Instead, from travelling Yoruba cinema on, they innovated their own structures. 44. Ibid., p. 163. 45. Ibid., p. 129. 46. « Niamey Manifesto of African Film-Makers: First International Conference on Cinema Production in Africa, Niamey, Niger, March 1-4, 1982 », Black Camera, vol. 1, n° 2, 2010, p. 111-116.
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calls for the production of films by Africans addressing African realities. But he also calls for a “radical change” in production and distribution networks, and that control of images demands control of infrastructure at the same time47. The contemporary material turn in screen studies is prefigured in this longer history of African cinema. It is not a repudiation of that history, it is an extension of it.
The rise of video based popular cinemas in Nigeria, Ghana and elsewhere in the 1990s again brought the issue of platform into central focus. In its early days, these productions were known as “home videos” but because that term referred to something quite different in the U.S. and U.K., Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, writing the first works on the subject, referred to them by the oxymoron “Nigerian Video Films48”. This was a cinematic form screened on television and almost never at the cinema49, it was a film industry that used no film. Video was transgressive in that it upset established boundaries and, like all transgressive objects, calls the nature of those boundaries into question. Fespaco, the premier African film festival banned all films shot on video in an attempt to impose order on what the definition of a “film” should be, in doing so highlighting the epistemic, cultural, technical and institutional differences between these cinemas. But, even as they did so, they made the platform that carried feature length stories into an object of dense cultural politics and conflict. Contemporary scholarly anxiety over the rise of streaming services, multiplexes, and satellite television stations, is an extension of this same history – one that places systems of distribution and the material structures of film at the center of analysis.
The platforms of New Nollywood
I wish to turn now to a more focused discussion of some of the changes associated with new Nollywood and the link between the nature of the image and the increased penetration of neo-liberal capital into Nigeria. This issue has become a major focus of scholars who have sought to track and analyze the nature of fundamental technical shifts in the industry.
47. M. Hondo, « What is Cinema for Us? », in I. Bakari et M. Cham (dir.), African Experiences of Cinema, Londres, British Film Institute, 1996, p. 40. 48. These terms were encoded in the first scholarly works on the subject. A. U. Adamu, Y. M. Adamu et U. F. Jibril (dir.). Hausa Home Videos: Technology, Economy, Society, Kano, Bayero University Kano Press, 2004 ; J. Haynes et O. Okome, « Evolving Popular Media… », art. cité. 49. Adejunmobi referred to it as the “detheatricalization” of film. Voir M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities… », art. cité.
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One symbolic focus of public and scholarly concern has settled on the technical quality of the image and, for scholars, and the way that technical quality embodies neoliberal capital itself. “In New Nollywood’s endeavor to standardize its trade and foster a glossy visual style” Ryan argues, “conside- rable effort has been put toward the mastery of cinematography and production design, such that the image itself directly expresses value rather than merely providing the frame or container for some valued object50”. As part of their effort to separate themselves – aesthetically and technically – from old Nollywood, Adejunmobi argues that new Nollywood directors foreground the technical details of their filmmaking, highlighting the cameras they use, the technical sophistication of their sets, and the time and care they take in shooting and editing51. This concern for technical quality even marks the serials that fill up many hours of satellite television and which have come in for particular criticism as being stylish but cheaply made and vacuous in ambition. “The opening graphics can be impressively sophisticated” Jonathan Haynes argues, “but the scripts are negligible… The whole budget is spent creating a certain look”. He continues, in an argument that may sum up much of the ambivalence scholars and a great deal of older filmmakers have for these productions: “These might be the emptiest productions ever offered to the Nigerian public and are a pure example of corporately-produced mass culture, designed to model consumption in a capitalist economy52.” To be clear, Haynes is referring to a specific sub-genre of television melodramas rather than more aesthetically ambitious multiplex films. And he, like all contemporary theorists, is registering ambivalence, anxious about the relations of this cinema to a creeping neoliberalism but also realizing it is leading to genuine aesthetic successes.
It is in this critique that current scholars of Nollywood come closest to sounding like earlier critics of cultural imperialism. In 1969, the Cuban filmmaker Juan Garcià Espinosa argued that “technically, artistically masterful [cinema] – is almost always reactionary” calling for a new poetics of imperfection to challenge that cinema53. Haynes returns to a tradition of political economy in film theory that explores how broader systems of capital can be located at the level of the image. And it indicates an anxiety that
50. C. Ryan, « New Nollywood… », art. cité. 51. M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities… », art. cité. See also Haynes in this issue. 52. J. Haynes, « Between the Informal Sector… », art. cité, p. 259. Noah Tsika similarly notes that “Filmmakers who sign contracts with EbonyLife TV invariably receive instructions to make their films ‘look American’ – meaning polished and professional”. N. A. Tsika, « Nollywood Chronicles… », art. cité, p. 282. 53. J. G. Espinosa et J. Garciá, « For an Imperfect Cinema », Jump Cut, n° 20, 1979, p. 24, <https:// w w w.eju mpc ut.org/a rc h ive/on l i nessays/JC20folder/Imperfec tCi nema.ht m l> Accessed July 17 2019. See also H. Steyerl, « In Defense of the Poor Image », art. cité.
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the demand for “international standard” images betrays a complicity with international capital. I agree with much of this critique but I also want to consider how aspirations toward an international standard may have a different politics, one we can see best if we turn toward that scholarship on African cinema that focuses on the presence of foreign films rather than on the media Africans themselves produce. Since the height of the critique that cinema was a mode of cultural colonization a formidable scholarship has appeared examining in historical depth the deep popularity of foreign cinemas all over Africa from the 1940s onward54. These scholars argue that the pleasure African audiences took from foreign films were central to practices of self and social realization rather than cultural alienation. They radically rejected the argument that African culture should be produced by turning inward toward deep cultural traditions untouched by the violence of colonial rule and argued, instead, that Africans have always been engaged in a dynamic exchange with other places through which African cultural practice and social identity has been formed.
In his classic article, “The 1960s in Bamako”, Manthia Diawara writes at length how young Malians in the 1960s borrowed sounds, images and styles from the U.S., France and Britain in to articulate a new form of cultural identity55. For the elder nationalist generation, this form of copying was everything they had fought against, evidence youths were mimicking the culture of the colonizer, betraying the future of nationalist Africa. For Malian youths, including Diawara himself, these images and sounds embodied a “complete and clear language of modernity”. Copying these styles was not a loss of identity but “a liberation and realization of the self56”. Charles Gondola makes similar argument writing about a very different class fraction of Congolese society where a young underclass in urban areas began to dress and act like cowboys from American films57. Young “Bills”, according to Gondola, appropriated the style, slang and violence from American cowboy films in order to articulate a language of opposition to the social order, using foreign films to develop a new, distinctly urban identity. In my own work I have written on the ways Hausa youths incorporated stories and music from Indian films into Hausa literature, film and music as a means of expressing ambitions, desires and frustrations with the social worlds within which youths find themselves58. Diawara, and the literature examining cowboy, gangster,
54. See note 6. 55. M. Diawara, « 1960s in Bamako: Malick Sidibe and James Brown », Black Renaissance/Renaissance noire, vol. 4, n° 2-3, 2002, p. 59 56. Ibid. 57. C. D. Gondola, Tropical Cowboys…, op. cit. 58. B. Larkin, « Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers… », art. cite.
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Indian and other film genres, points to the ways in which newly urbanized peoples, forging identities for themselves, found powerful resources in the flows of foreign media that were part of the broader cinematic ecology of urban life. As Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have argued, this is part of a much longer history whereby Africa has always been embedded in multiple elsewheres out of which “societies compose and invent themselves in the present59”.
The desire to pursue an “international standard” image that allows popular cinemas to circulate in international commercial festivals and appeal to a global audience should be seen in the same way that popular engagement with American and Indian films are. They represent genuine cultural aspirations, what Mbembe would term self-writing. The link to neo-liberalism is clear, as many scholars have argued, but we should not reduce the desire for technical sophistication to this alone. This is partly because the desire for technical excellence must be analyzed in the context of the structural violence of infrastructural breakdown that haunts much of Africa. Breakdown in many parts of Africa is an everyday fact of life. In a world where access to technology has long been a powerful index of the modern and denial of that access a form of abjection, the insistence on making films of superior technical quality carries a political charge.
African cinema always existed against a background that Africans could not make films, that they were incapable of using technologies, that they existed in technologically inferior worlds. When Ousmane Sembène directed Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968) it was not just the first film in Africa to be shot in an indigenous language but was also shot on 35mm, i.e. on a high resolution, technically rich format. This made it expensive, requiring more capital, but was driven by the fact “Sembène sought to make a feature-length film of a quality that would match the elevated standard of the commercial global film industry60”. 35mm film here becomes attached to a cultural and a political project, the density of resolution of the image carrying with it a civilizational freight, a talking back to accusations of technological inferiority. It is this history that lay behind the intense reaction against video which, for African filmmakers, seemed to be nothing but a demonstration of inferiority which those filmmakers had spent their lives challenging. In the early 2000s Ola Balogun, one of the most prominent Nigerian directors working in the tradition of African cinema, lobbied a fierce and uncompromising attack
59. A. Mbembe et S. Nuttall, « Writing the World from an African Metropolis », Public Culture, vol. 16, n° 3, 2004, p. 348. See also A. Mbembe, « African Modes of Self-Writing », Public Culture, vol. 14, n° 1, 2002, p. 239-273 ; A. Simone, « On the Worlding of African Cities », African Studies Review, vol. 44, n° 2, 2001, p. 15-41. 60. J. E. Genova, Cinema and Development in West Africa, op. cit., p. 138.
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on Nollywood arguing that its popularity with Western journalists and documentary makers came about because it confirmed their prejudice that Africans were technically backward. Balogun compared praise for Nollywood to the admiration and earlier generation of Western literary critics had for the “quaint and ungrammatical writings” of the author Amos Tutuola and which “the western media held out as wonderful examples of African ‘inventiveness’61”. “In rather the same manner today, the western media are delighted to be able to uphold the crude and childish output of the Nigerian home video as examples of the best that Africa can offer in the field of film62.” In praising Nollywood, Balogun is arguing, western media seems to celebrate it but in fact taps back into this longer history of seeing Africans as incapable of taking part in modernity on the same terms. Nollywood is admired but only by turning it into kitsch63.
If media are a conduit for considering whether a people are “in” or “out” of history, or where they are arraigned along its continuum, then the desire to shoot on film – as Sembène did in 1968 or Izu Ojukwu did for his film ’76 in 2016 – can to be seen as a cultural and political statement. It is a demand that African film be taken seriously on an equal footing with international standard cinema. The cost of this, as many have pointed out, is that self-same desire can result in producing films that are far less popular with a mass audience. But Africa is large and diverse with a range of audiences separated by taste and interest which should not be expected to be standardized. African artists producing challenging works to be screened in biennials and galleries are representing a different ambition for engaging with the world than popular arts do but both remain important. The desire for quality images, to operate at an international standard, should be seen as an aspiration that needs to be taken seriously as well as subject to critique. When the director Chris Eneaji found that his films had been pirated and were selling on the
61. O Balogun, « Does Nigeria Indeed Have a Film Industry? », This Day, 11 June 2005. 62. Ibid. 63. Interestingly, this argument parallels the insurgent African critique of art history in the 1990s. Olu Oguibe excoriates Western curators, collectors and critics for whom popular arts have “remained the focus of Western fascination and… promoted as quintessential contemporary African expression” (1999, p. 24). “The childlike paintings of the Beninois, Cyprien Toukoudagba, would not ordinarily represent great creative talent in the West, and would not, conventionally, qualify as art beyond the sixth grade… But Toukoudagba’s naïve drawings are today preferred in the West to the more sophisticated, more familiar forms that represent the cutting edge of contemporary African art precisely because his works fall below those standards” (1999, p. 24-25). Oguibe questions why it is (at that time) curators preferred sign writers, paintings of the occult, and other popular arts made by individuals trained outside the art world rather than those of African artists directly engaged with it. O. Oguibe, « Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art », in O. Enwezor and C. Okeke-Agulu (dir.), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999, p. 17-28.
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open market he stated: “the only thing I made sure about was to rush and see that the quality stays so someone doesn’t see it [his film] and feel it is not made properly… I was amazed to see that the copy they have is just as clear as the one that I had released. I was quite happy64.” To have your film ripped off, bundled with 7 others, and sold cheaply on a single DVD in ways that will fundamentally destroy your ability to gain economic security from your work might elicit a range of emotions. The fact that aesthetics, not economics, is first on Eneaji’s mind indicates that the desire of filmmakers to make high quality images is not simply the visual expression of neo-liberalism but something more. It is genuine ambition to push African cultural production into new terrain.
I began this article citing the argument by Haynes, Jedlowski and others that with the transition toward digital platforms and the emergence of a techni- cally sophisticated popular cinema we need a new critical language to analyze these events. My argument is that this new critical language in fact taps into an analytic tradition that has been an integral part of the analysis of African screen media since independence. This tradition has joined the analysis of film with an analysis of the infrastructures that support and distribute it. It has examined how the material status of the image has been the site for a series for broader political controversies and how this continues until today. The cultural and political debate over the status of the image in new popular cinema returns our focus to the ways in which the materiality of systems of distribution, and their cultural, political and aesthetic effects. Highlighting this intellectual lineage refuses easy distinctions between the textual and the infrastructural, still less between the humanities and the social sciences, but ploughs a furrow where these traditions blur into one another. It also moves us beyond binary distinctions between festival and popular cinemas or between old and new Nollywood by seeing how a series of different cine- mas have brought these issues into view. It should go without saying that the strength of this tradition, and my focus on it here, does not eradicate other scholarly approaches, such as hermeneutics or auteur theory. But it does represent a distinctive history which has been amplified and deepened in recent scholarship across the range of African screen media n
Brian Larkin,
Barnard College, Columbia University
64. C. McCain « An Evolution in Nollywood… », p. 212.
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Résumé Les bases matérielles de la circulation : repenser les médias audiovisuels africains La forme esthétique et les infrastructures financières du cinéma populaire africain
se sont transformées au cours des dernières années, entraînant une révision des paradigmes théoriques utilisés pour les étudier. Ce texte revient sur cette réflexion. Il se concentre sur trois aspects en particulier. Premièrement, je soutiens que l’analyse récente des infrastructures techniques, financières et institutionnelles qui permettent aux films africains de circuler s’inscrit dans une histoire plus longue que ce que l’on pense habituellement, et cela constitue peut-être l’un de ses aspects les plus innovants. Deuxièmement, je développe mon analyse en allant au-delà de la dichotomie entre le cinéma africain d’auteur et le cinéma populaire, pour englober les cinémas éducatifs coloniaux et postcoloniaux, la présence historique et continue de films étrangers en Afrique (américains, indiens, chinois, français) et la scène émergeant du cinéma de galeries d’art. Ces différentes formes ont toutes généré un riche débat scientifique, mais de manière séparée les unes des autres, et selon moi, nous pouvons les analyser de manière fructueuse dans le cadre d’une même écologie cinématographique. Troisièmement, je passe d’une discussion générale sur les infrastructures de production et de distribution à un recentrage plus étroit sur le phénomène du « nouveau Nollywood » au Nigeria. Je réexamine les débats récents sur les effets politiques de ces nouvelles infrastructures de production et distribution, et leur supposée complicité avec le néolibéralisme contemporain.
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