VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

documentaries creates the risk of overstating its influence and impact on Nigerian society andculture.III: Nollywood BabylonIV: Nollywood ladyIn the attempt to provide an as wide as possible introduction to the video industry, most films tryto include sequences from Nollywood videos. The criteria of selection are not homogeneous. Insome cases the documentaries present video sequences from the repertoire of the intervieweddirectors and actors while in other cases they pick up some scenes from the classics of Nollywoodcanon. In some other cases the criteria of selection are less clear. The scenes, however, areinevitably short and episodic, and have the objective of giving a taste of Nollywood aesthetics andnarrative to audiences that are not familiar with them. In almost all documentaries, and often towardthe beginning of them, a number of clips from trailers of recent releases are edited together. Noisyand full of special effects, these trailers are condensed pills of Nollywood-style moviemaking.Made to catch the audience’s attention as quickly as possible, trailers (in Nigeria as elsewhere in theworld) often privilege rather transgressive scenes (violence, sex, witchcraft and spectacular specialeffects) put together in fast editing sequences with loud music and voice-over. But the reality is thatbeyond the trailers, many Nigerian videos are relatively slow and talkative, with fairly moderateamount of explicitly sexual scenes. Violence and witchcraft do appear frequently but the scenespresented in the trailers are often the most crude that a film can possibly have, the rest of a videobeing eventually a progressive escalation toward the sensational scene picked up for theadvertisement. The trailer sequences included in most documentaries produce in the audience ashocking experience of Nollywood’s aesthetics. This impact has an important and somehowrefreshing role in the general economy of the documentaries. It gives in fact the editing somerhythm to balance the slower interview sequences. At the same time it cannot avoid giving theaudience a polarized representation of the videos’ aesthetics, one that suggests the figure of the“extreme” as the main aesthetic specificity of Nollywood style.118