VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

My intention in this chapter is to deal with these complex issues by focusing on the videos’specific film language. While, as I will discuss in the first section of this text, there are a number ofelements in the videos' contents that participated importantly in building their transnational success,my opinion is that Nollywood videos' film language has had a pivotal role in this dynamic. “Theaddressivity of texts – their ways of ‘turning to’ an audience – not only reveals cultural assumptionsabout how people exist together in society, but also plays a part in constituting audiences asparticular kinds of collectivity” (Barber 2007: 202). As Benedict Anderson (1983) hasdemonstrated, this dynamic has played an important role in nation-building processes worldwide.The emergence of print capitalism and the addressivity of the texts it produced have in fact played apivotal role in transforming dispersed audiences into national “publics”. However, as Karin Barberunderlines, these dynamics have worked differently in different geographic contexts. In Nigeria forinstance, the emergence of new forms of literature, oral culture and media production during boththe colonial and the post-colonial time, generated transversal rather than national publics. As Barberputs it,these new imagined constituencies did not necessarily coincide with the nation. In theformative years of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, externally defined nations of Africa,emergent classes of literati experimented with new genres of print capitalism in order toconvene shifting publics, whose boundaries seemed to shrink and expand from momentto moment, sometimes consolidating ethnic linguistic communities far smaller than thenational entity, at other times bypassing the nation to convoke a pan-African, black, orpan-human audience (2007: 202).When we analyze the pan-African circulation of Nigerian videos, this debate becomes particularlyrelevant. We can in fact interpret Nigerian videos as a medium that, by way of its specific filmlanguage, addressed audiences that do not coincide with the boundaries of the post-colonial nationstate.To develop such a kind of addressivity, Nigerian videos’ film language incorporated elementscoming from an extremely large spectrum of narrative experiences. As much academic literaturehas demonstrated, a high degree of heterogeneity and intertextuality characterizes most forms ofpopular culture around the African continent and elsewhere (cf. Barber 1987 and 1997; Cohen andToninato 2009). Nigerian videos are not an exception within this context, and while they surelyintroduced a number of original narrative and aesthetic elements, they also internalized severalaspects coming from preexisting forms of local and transnational popular culture. As Karin Barber142