The Personal Interview

Piety in Production: Video Filmmaking as Religious Encounter in Bénin by Brian C. Smithson Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ J. Lorand Matory, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Charles Piot, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Anne Allison ___________________________ David Morgan An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Brian C. Smithson 2018

Piety in Production: Video Filmmaking as Religious Encounter in Bénin

Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century: art films and the Nollywood video revolution

Preface and Acknowledgments A Note on Orthography and Taxonomy Introduction: Global Stars in Nigeria's Postindependence Firmament: From Ossie Davis to Doctor Bello 1. From Yoruba to YouTube: Studying Nollywood's Star System 2. Glittering Video: Format, Fashion, and the Materiality of Nollywood Stardom 3. A Mobile Glow: Nollywood Stardom and Corporate Globalism 4. When Stars Collide: Lady Gaga and the Pirating of a Globalized Persona 5. Nollywood's Progeny: Stardom and the Politics of Youth Empowerment 6. Professionalizing Childhood: Nollywood and the New Youth Transnationalism Afterword: Honoring Nollywood Stars Filmography Notes Bibliography Index

Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora

Once criticised as ‘seemingly’ oblivious of the political and historical concerns of the
state (Osofisan, 2007; Adesokan, 2009b; Alamu, 2010; Okome, 2010; Mistry &
Ellapen, 2013), some southern Nigerian filmmakers have begun reversing such critical
narratives through negotiated images of the country’s political history. In spite of that,
academic attention to such videos remains on the margins of textual or isolated audience
analyses. This research questions the motivations, narrative techniques, underlying
ideologies and reception of video films that construct Nigeria’s political past between
1967 and 1998, two significant moments in the country’s postcolonial history. This is
achieved through contextual and post-structuralist readings of the films as popular art as
well as semi-structured interviews of filmmakers and film journalists. The study found
that historicizing an ethnically-diverse postcolonial state such as Nigeria through the
agency of film is fraught with potential dangers, most of which cannot be mitigated by
the filmmakers. Each stage of the production/consumption process is compounded by
societal factors including filmmaker’s background, finance, audience and censorship.
Also evident from the findings is that popular Nigerian videos sustain and subvert the
dominant narratives on popular arts to gain economic advantage. Whereas some
filmmakers endorse politicians’ practices, others subvert authoritarian regimes through
metaphoric filmic codes (negotiated images) intelligible to audiences and deployed by
the producers in order to circumvent censorship. Interrogating film journalists in
addition to filmmakers served as an antidote to film producers’ self-reporting. By
examining the reception of films through the lens of journalists, this study makes no
generalisable claims on audiences, but delivers an original methodological approach to
understanding films made in the past, about the past. Thus, the study proposes opening
up the methodological approaches to Nollywood to accommodate film texts, producers
and audiences rather than lone textual analyses that silence creators and consumers.

Nigerian filmmakers and their construction of a political past (1967-1998)

One of the most striking stories in recent global film history is the dramatic rise of the Nigerian “video film” industry, dubbed Nollywood, a prolific low-budget film industry based in Africa’s most populous country. Turning out over a thousand feature films a year, the Nigerian film industry relies mostly on digital video technology and “straight to video” releases, which are sold on DVD and video CD in the informal economy of the west African market.1 A former British colony, Nigeria, was cobbled together from around 400 different ethnicities and language groups, the largest of which are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. After gaining independence in 1960, Nigeria suffered a civil war, from 1967 until 1970, and a series of military coups. Now a federation of 36 states, the country is in its third period of civilian rule, which began in 1999 with the handover of the military to a democratically elected government.

Nollywood, Kannywood, and a Decade of Hausa Film Censorship in Nigeria

Video Exposé: Metafiction and Message In Nigerian Films

Fespaco In A Time of Nollywood: The Politics of The ‘Video’ Film At Africa’S Oldest Festival

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.7.2.194

An Evolution in Nollywood, Nigeria's New Wave: A Conversation with Chris Eneaji

The current trend in Nollywood Studies is to focus on the way video films are being made and consumed around the world, a focus that parallels the name “Nollywood,” which, as Jonathan Haynes and Alessandro Jedlowski point out, references the film industries of Hollywood and Bollywood (Haynes, “Nollywood” 106; Jedlowski, “Videos” 11). While such studies are important in understanding the global impact of Nigeria’s film industry, a focus on migration, diaspora, and transnationalism of largely English-language films often overshadows those being made in Nigerian languages. Ironically, according to 2011 National Film and Video Censor’s Board statistics, Nigerian-language films are currently about 75% of the productions being made in Nigeria (Bala, “2011” 18). While research is being done on Nigerian-language films, the theorizing about Nollywood most found often at international conferences and in international publications is most often of English-language productions. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It ignores the majority of the films being made and consumed in Nigeria, as well as the local discourses surrounding them; 2) It overlooks the full history of the video film in Nigeria, as well as nuances and variations in the style and culture of Nigerian-language film industries; 3) It risks missing the way that Nigerian-language films are also crossing borders and appealing to transnational audiences. Such oversight creates gaping holes in the research used to theorize the video phenomenon in Nigeria. The first part of my article examines English-language hegemony in representations of Nollywood, and the second part demonstrates why the study of Nigerian-language films is important in theorizing Nollywood. While I touch on multiple Nigerian-language industries, the bulk of my examples and analysis come from the Hausa language industry which I have been studying since 2005.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.7.1.30

Nollywood and Its Others: Questioning English Language Hegemony in Nollywood Studies

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