VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Amongst the numerous festivals that emerged in the past few years, the one that became the mostsuccessful is the AMAA, which, as I mentioned earlier, is modeled after the American Oscars(image VIII). One of the main reasons for its success probably is precisely its capacity ofembodying the “American dream” that traverses much of Nigerian popular culture, the dream ofbeing for Africa what the United States is for the world. While in the first few editions AMAAremained a mainly Nigerian and Nollywood-centered affair, in the past three to four years itmanaged to achieve a Pan-African popularity. In this sense it interestingly exemplifies the distancethat separates Nigerian festivals from international retrospectives on Nollywood. AMAA in factexpresses a precise statement: African cinema and African popular culture do not need Westernlegitimization to access global cinema and international audiences. 105 As the concern that theinternational representation of Nollywood generated amongst the industry’s practitionersdemonstrates (see below), however, this statement is still more a declaration of intents than anactual reality. But it interestingly points toward the nodal issue this chapter is looking at: theWestern-generated discourse on African popular culture has no chance to go unchallenged.Postcolonial exotic and the construction of a Nigerian “junkspace” modernityWhat are the effects of the international representation of Nollywood on the way the industry isglobally received and on the way the video phenomenon is evolving? To answer these questions itmight be useful to look at one of the most extreme and complex examples of decontextualization ofthe Nollywood phenomenon: Peiter Hugo’s photographic exhibition “Nollywood” (Hugo 2009 –see images IX and X). This collection of photographs by the highly successful and verycontroversial South African photographer of the award-winning series The Hyena and Other Men(Hugo 2007), is in fact a very interesting case to look at to interpret the complex game of reflectionand refraction the international discourse on Nollywood is based upon.As Hugo has often repeated, his photographs do not have the intention of representing theirobject according to naturalistic conventions. Hugo in fact considers the possibility of realism inphotography as a mere illusion:I have a deep suspicion of photography, to the point where I do sometimes think itcannot accurately portray anything, really. And, I particularly distrust portrait105 An interesting example of this dynamic is the Congolese film Viva Riva (2010), which won numerous awards duringits first international release at the AMAA 2011, and then went on to achieve global theatrical distribution.127