VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

phenomenon, affirming new aesthetic and production values. The differences between thesepositions are connected to diverging experiences of migration as well as to different ways ofrelating with local national cinema industries and with local Nigerian diasporic communities.Throughout this section I argue that for the Nigerian production companies active in Europe,Nollywood has worked as a brand to gain recognition. However, the position of these productioncompanies in relation to the video industry in Nigeria is ambiguous. They found themselves stuckin between European and Nigerian audiences, styles, production and distribution strategies. Theirin-betweenness is at the same time their strength and their weakness. They would hardly existwithout such a condition, but this same condition condemns them to a radical marginality towardboth Nigerian and European cinema.Conclusion: Research in motionAs much recent anthropological scholarship has underlined (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997;Marcus 1995), we live in a world of increasingly deterritorialized cultures. Exponentialdevelopment of media technologies, growing globalization of capitalism, and gigantic transnationalfluxes of people have transformed the world in the past few decades. Mobility has become the keyword around which new “cultures of circulation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002) are politically, sociallyand economically organized. Within this context ethnographic research cannot but be mobile itself.As George Marcus pointed out, an ethnographic research of this kind, a “multi-sited ethnography”as he defines it (1995), has to “follow” its object of interest, trace its movements, recognize itstransformations, define its attributes in relation to its complex biography.The research I present throughout these pages has been organized in a similar way. I moved fromthe periphery of Italian cities, to the centres of video production in Nigeria, from film festivals inLondon, Ouagadougou, Milan and Bayelsa, to the video clubs of some remote neighbourhood ofLagos and Accra. I interviewed ambitious directors in the courtyards of their homes, and I discussedthe future of Nigerian cinema in the halls of intimidating government offices. I was welcomed inthe houses of numerous people, in Nigeria, Ghana, Italy, England and the United States, to learnmore about the history of Nollywood by the people that made it, and I attended seminars andconferences in universities around Europe, West Africa and the United States, to hear the officialformulation of this same history.All these experiences were possible only thanks to the warm and friendly help of a long list ofpeople, that guided and assisted me along this itinerary. Alessandro Triulzi and Jonathan Haynes14