Nollywood – Nigerian Video Films: From Rages to Riches Lecture 10 Derek Barker

Zeb Ejiro From Niger Delta 6 credits as director; 6 credits as producer; 3 credits as writer (Brother Chico Ejiro has 76 credits as director)

Zeb Ejiro Domitilla 15” 27” 42” 51” 59” 1’09” 1’36” 1’40”

Qs 1 1.Provide a plot summary (half page)

Qs 2 2. What are the key themes of the movie?

Qs 3 3. Describe representations of: Fathers Mothers Families Politicians

Qs 4 4. Is the film progressive or conservative? Is it a political film? Which norms does it confirm, which norms does it challenge?

Qs 5 5. Is this film a popular film?

10 course films Art house film or popular films? 1.Domitilla (Zeb Ejiro, 1996)

List of films 1.Living in Bondage (Chris Obi-Rapu, 1992) 2.Domitilla (Zeb Ejiro, 1996) 3.Owo Blow (Tade Ogidan, 1997) 4.Osuofia in London I & II (Kingsley Ogoro, 2003) 5.Mothers-in-law (Chika Onu, 2004) 6.Beautiful Faces (Kabat Esosa Egbon, 2004) 7.Through the Glass (Stephanie Okereke, 2008) 8.The Figurine (Kunle Afolayan, 2009) 9.Ma’ami (Tunde Kelani, 2012) 10. So Daya (Rosy International, 2013)

Jonathan Haynes New Nollywood? LEVEL 1 At the top, films by people like Afolayan and Kelani will open their runs at the fancier theaters before moving down the chain. Emeruwa estimates some forty or fifty films a year could be released at this level.

Jonathan Haynes New Nollywood? LEVEL 2 On the next level, perhaps two or three hundred films a year, or more as theater construction took hold, would be released initially in the community cinemas, then through new media, and finally sold as DVDs with additional features—not as VCDs, the current standard.

Jonathan Haynes New Nollywood? LEVEL 3 Below that, the old Nollywood would continue as it has done, releasing new films straight onto VCDs, serving the mass of the population that cannot afford anything else.

Silverbird

Lola Frost What is the connection between Aesthetics and Politics?

Lola Frost Roland Bleiker: aesthetic approaches engage a gap that opens up between the form of representation and the object of that representation and that this hiatus is the very space of politics.

Lola Frost

Gap between SIGNIFIER / SIGNIFIED Always invites interpretation, and this is the [potential] site of politics This is emancipating when: such aesthetic experiences become an opportunity for reflection, interpretation

Lola Frost BUT (says Lola) objects and practices of an aesthetic regime [also] enact a politics of resistance to all thought, even if (at the same time) such objects and practices paradoxically also provoke interpretation and understanding. (in Bleiker’s sense)

Lola Frost Bleiker says aesthetics matter because: Events happen in the world that matter to you and me, but the Q is how do they matter? We fall back on “aesthetic regimes” to (help) explain the meaning of events Thus we can better assess how to promote our best interests (= politics)

Lola Frost Ranciere says aesthetics matter because: General ways of making & doing in the real world SEPARATE FROM Aesthetic ways of making & doing and these are political in so far as they question the general ways

Lola Frost Aesthetics resists direct / mimetic representation (=STANDARD POLITICS) POLITICAL REGIMES realist, bureaucratic, instrumental and rationalist regimes, themselves opposed to aesthetics. AESTHETIC REGIMES When they “make thought strange” such regimes enact aesthetic signifying processes which produce confusion, indeterminacy, ambivalence and irresolution indeterminate negativities of aesthetic affect (emotion, perception, sensation) = Politics of Experience

Lola Frost BAD (or “no so political”) ART: art which unambiguously negotiates certain power relations, like murals made by township residents in South Africa in the early 1990s which [directly] registered the political struggles of Africans against the forces of apartheid. Such art, in delivering an unambiguous political message, was not at all interested in making thought strange to itself.

Lola Frost GOOD ART: For example, Siemon Allen’s The Birds is a large wall “tapestry” made from a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s film titled The Birds. This work mobilises a trope of cultural integration through its reference to African weaving practices. But this work also overwhelms its cultural politics, for any viewer the primary signifying event is the experience of unspeakable affect.

Siemon Allen’s The Birds

Lola Frost This large shimmering and beautiful object refuses comprehension and only announces its identity as a particular film in the smallest of unreadable 16 mm frames. Here, thought is rendered foreign to itself in ways that we might, upon reflection, identify as sublime, as something we cannot name, even as we experience it as overwhelming.

Lola Frost Pieter Hugo’s “Nollywood” exhibition Hugo’s staged photographs could be read as the spectacularisation of otherness. Exotic otherness usually functions within a primitivist discourse as the binary opposite of European civilisation, and thus also sustains the margin/metropole power relation characteristic of colonial discourses (and therefore conservative / racist?)

Gabazzini Zuo

Tarry King Ibuzo.

Emeka Uzzi

Ibegbu Natty

Princess Adoabi

Lola Frost The exhibition makes the point that the large and successful Nigerian film industry mobilises a persistent aesthetic that is “loud, violent, excessive, nothing is said, everything shouted”.

Lola Frost Two features of this exhibition invite the viewer to go beyond colonial and primitivist discourses : firstly, the sensationalist, loud and excessive properties of these photographs operate as a parody of primitivism

Lola Frost secondly the exhibition offers a key to rethinking how the depiction of such violent excess is not the enactment of the spectacularisation of otherness, but its deconstruction

Lola Frost The photographs arrogate against a determinate interpretation, rendering thought “strange to itself” and destabilizing or simply making impossible any definitive or conclusive remarks and even opening up thought to reflection (on binaries such as civilized / barbaric, etc.)

Lola Frost The aesthetic regime has a core identity which mobilises a double politics [and not only one].

Lola Frost Firstly, its multiple and complex aesthetic affects and disruptive manoeuvres render thought foreign to itself [usually considered NON- POLITICAL]

Lola Frost Secondly [it mobilises a politics] where such aesthetic experience becomes an opportunity for reflection, interpretation [usually considered the ONLY political part]

Lola Frost Conclusion: even those objects and practices which make thought strange to itself, and which are available only as aesthetic experience, are also political

Questions Huh?

Homework Before Lecture 11 (Friday 23 January 2015) do 3 things: 1)Watch “Through the Glass” (Okereke, 2008): Part 1: y=1 y=1 Part 2: Part 3: 2) Read “From Yoruba to Youtube: Studying Nollywood’s Star System” 3) Review the film by posting a comment on the blog