Lagos is the ground of the films, not just in the sense that ... - myweb

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and modern wealth. 7 Money rituals in which a human being is sacrificedto bring miraculous wealth were already established in Nigerian popularculture before the rise of the videos, as a figure for the mysterious, unearnedwealth of the oil boom (Barber 1982; Smith 2001). Such rituals have beena hallmark of Nigerian videos from their beginning (featured, for instance,in the founding film of the video boom, Living in Bondage 1), and they areassociated with “bigmen” and the spectacle of flashy wealth in Lagos.Households at all income levels are haunted by ghosts, often of virtuouswives and mothers wickedly done away with (Living in Bondage 1 and2; Blood Sister); households contain jealousies that give rise to witchcraftattacks (Iya Ibeji Eleran Igbe); households are infiltrated by demonic forcesthat must be cast out by Christian pastors (The Maid). Meyer makes a strongargument for the role of pentecostal Christianity in shaping the way occultforces are represented in video films (Meyer 1998, 2002a, 2002b), but Christianitydoes not have a monopoly on access to the spiritual realm. Divinersare frequently consulted in times of difficulty, and they may be Yorubababalawos or Igbo dibias, good (Iya Ibeji Eleran Igbe) or evil (South Connection),honest (419 Connection) or dishonest (419 Connection again), effective(Compromise) or ineffective (Rituals). Occult forces appear in many guises,sometimes in the raffia skirts and kaolin face painting of indigenous religioustraditions, sometimes in imitation of Hollywood horror films, sometimes infanciful original concoctions. Special effects are integral to their representation,from magical appearances and disappearances managed by simplystopping the camera, through spiritual-force laser beams emanating fromeyes or fingers, to extensive digitalized imagery, as at the beginning and endof Six Demons, where computer-generated demons rise from and sink intoa computer-generated sea. Postproduction companies (House of Macro, TFP)specialize in this work. Highly standardized, electronically generated soundsaccompany occult manifestations. In these dimensions as well, the occult isassociated with the cutting edge of modernity, not with the “primitive.”Spiritual warfare rages throughout the city—another level of dangerand conflict made visible, shadowing the ordinarily visible city. The videosdo not agree about the forms of the spiritual realm. In general, they display arange of ideological and cultural positions: liberal and conservative when itcomes to women’s roles, Christian fundamentalist and cultural nationalist,grounding themselves in an ethnic or traditionalist morality or emulatinga Western-oriented cosmopolitanism, and so on. Nevertheless, in spite ofthe variety I have noted throughout this essay, there is a remarkable coherenceto the representation of Lagos that emerges from these films. Wealthand poverty, the modern and the traditional, the police and the streets, maybe valued differently or even oppositely, but they are imaged in much thesame way, with a common visual vocabulary. Opposites tend to meet: thelure of garish riches might seem antithetical to born-again Christianity, forinstance, but the former serves as the requisite temptation in the moralitytales of the latter—and in the many Lagos “prosperity churches,” garishriches are seen as proof of divine favor (Ukah 2003). Teco Benson is both aafrica today 145 Jonathan Haynes
africa today 146 Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Filmsleading practitioner of the American-inspired action genre, filled with imagesof expensive, sleek urban surfaces (State of Emergency), and a leading director,in association with the Reverend Helen Ukpabio, of Christian videos(End of the Wicked; Highway to the Grave). From vernacular fooling amidthe garbage of a slum, through intimate emotional betrayals and spiritualcombat against demonic assailants, to the political maneuvering of thehyperrich, the films seem like pieces of a mosaic, rather than contradictoryand competing representations. The popular imagination from which theyspring is syncretic (Barber 1987) and elastic; the genres mix and interpenetrateso each film and each kind of film shades into others; the constraintsof their budgets and the sharing of personnel and procedures form similarimages. All this tends to produce a seamless, motley fabric. Heavily genericand saturated with the supernatural, the films may seem to contradict ournotions of realism, but they spring from a common ground—Lagos—and theyvividly image their enormous, horrible, fascinating object of knowledge.Notes1. Other examples of the recent efflorescence of interest in Lagos include Bregtje van der Haak’sdocumentary film Lagos/Koolhaas and her and Silke Wawro’s interactive DVD Lagos Wide andClose, both stemming from the Rem Koolhaas / Harvard Project on the City research; KunleTejuoso and Weyinmi Atigbi’s coffeetable book Lagos: A City at Work (2005); dele jegede’scontribution to the interactive CD-ROM Five Windows Into Africa (McNaughton et al. 2000);Dan Ollman’s Suffering and Smiling, a documentary about the musician Fela Ransome-Kutiand his children; and a rash of foreign documentaries about Nollywood: Franco Sacchi’s Thisis Nollywood, Nick Moran’s Nick Does Nollywood, and Jamie Meltzer’s Welcome to Nollywood.2. Other cities and towns are frequently shown; many films are set in villages; one flourishinggenre, the cultural epic, is set in the precolonial or colonial historical past, and such films aretypically shot in rural areas. Producers often find it convenient to get their casts and crewsaway from the distractions of their lives in Lagos to shoot somewhere quieter and cheaper.3. The Censors Board tries to hold the line on certain fronts—obscene language, excessivesexuality, violence, and inflammatory political or ethnic positions—but does little or nothingto set the agenda of the films, visually or in any other way.4. The great exception to this rule is the cultural epic. In this case, it is easy to find, or, if necessary,to build, a village of thatched huts off in the bush, and costuming, often fancifully conceived,is a featured attraction. The Battle of Love, a film about the Biafran War, works at recreating the1960s, but this is the only film I am aware of that tries any such thing. The sense of anachronismis not natural; it did not arise in Western culture until the Renaissance and developedslowly thereafter (Garin 1965) and there is little sign that African audiences are disturbed byanachronisms in Nigerian films, though film reviewers in Nigerian newspapers occasionallypoint them out.5. In a study of representations of the city in Ghanaian video films, Esi Dogbe comments that “Thecity is visually and metaphorically the locus of wide-ranging patterns of cosmopolitan consumptionin which the camera itself, the filmmakers, the syncretic mix of beliefs represented,
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Lagos is the ground of the films, not just in the sense that ... - myweb

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