VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

it is possible to say that yet no Nigerian director has taken the initiative of telling the story ofNollywood from within. 94At film festivals, numerous retrospectives and special programs on Nollywood were presentedall over the world. The most influential were those that took place in festivals such as the Berlinale(2004 and 2008), the Festival of African, Asian and South American cinema of Milan (2005), theAmien film festival (2001) and the Rotterdam film festival (2004) in Europe; the New York AfricanFilm Festival (2001 and 2004), the Houston WorldFest (2002) and the Los Angeles film festival(2006) in the United States; the Seoul Film Festival (2002) and the JapanExpo (2005) in Asia. Evenif this list in not complete, it provides an idea of the wide circulation of Nollywood in the globalcinema arena throughout the past few years.Nollywood has also been the object of numerous film festivals and award ceremonies in Nigeriaitself. The most representative is the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA), created by theOsigwe Anyam-Osigwe Foundation in 2005 and directly forged on the American Oscar’s format.Beyond the AMAA, a number of other film festivals have emerged in Nigeria throughout the 2000ssuch as the THEMA Awards (since the mid-1990s), Abuja International Film Festival (since 2004),the BoBTV (since 2004), the Zuma Film Festival (since 2006) and the Africa International FilmFestival (since 2009). Like the difference between the Western-produced documentaries and theNigerian “making-of” videos, the difference between international and local festivals is interestingand suggests diverging ways of conceiving and interpreting the Nigerian video phenomenon.What kind of “Nollywood” did these forms of metaculture produce and circulate? And in whatway did these metacultures influence the way the Nigerian video industry is transforming? Theseare the questions this chapter focuses on, and the answers are inevitably multiple and complex. Infact, as I will argue throughout this chapter, while introducing the video phenomenon to non-African audiences, these discursive constructions also proposed an interpretation of Nollywoodwhich reveals a particular epistemological gesture. Within this framework the Nigerian videophenomenon becomes relevant as the representative of a specific declination of the modernizationproject. According to this perspective, Nollywood is considered as the expression of what we cancall, applying a term used by Rem Koolhaas (2002a), a “junkspace modernity”, that is, a modernitydefined by the outcomes of its own failure. The formulation of this interpretation of the video94 The documentary A VeryVvery Short Story of Nollywood is only partly an exception. Its director Awam Amkpa is aNigerian scholar based in the United States, but the documentary, as the title suggests, is only 15 minutes long and wassupposed to be the beginning of a longer project which has not yet seen the light. For this reason the docuemntary doesnot develop fully an identifiable perspective on the video phenomenon.115