VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

used, both by Western and non-Western scholars, to differentiate Third World cinema fromHollywood, becoming then a kind of second-class catch-all category within which films as diverseas those that come from India, Egypt or Latin America could fit. The conflict between these twoconceptions of the term obliges us to question the definition of this category. As Vasudevan rightlyasks, “how do we situate the move to make over American cinema tout court into melodrama inrelation to the differently calibrated rendering of melodrama in post-colonial situations?”(2010: 31).These two conceptions seem in fact to be almost irreconcilable: one of them considers melodramaas the basis of Hollywood cinema while the other uses melodrama as the defining element of whatHollywood is not.A way of overcoming this complex debate is to recognize the fact that, as Jonathan Haynes putsit “no one particular culture 'owns' melodrama at this point in history” (2000: 25). While as PeterBrooks (1976) among others have demonstrated, melodrama as a specific theatrical form has aprecise history which originates in eighteenth century post-revolutionary France, melodrama as ageneric category has become today a popular culture meta-genre, something that informs differentnarrative genres in literature, theater and cinema all over the world. In this sense Peter Brooks'seffort to move from the substantive (melodrama) to the adjective (melodramatic) seems particularlyuseful. It is in fact by identifying the attributes that define what Brooks calls “the melodramaticimagination” within the context of Nigerian video production that we can move forward in thisanalysis. Furthermore, moving our focus from the melodrama to the melodramatic, we can makesense of the continuity that characterizes Nigerian videos' film language, a continuity thattransversally cuts through most Nigerian video genres, from the family drama, to the comedy, fromthe epic to the religious videos. In fact, while no one specific Nollywood genre seems to be amelodrama in the full, classical sense of the term, all genres contain within them melodramaticattributes which make them easily recognizable for largely diverse audiences. Within thisframework, melodramatic attributes can be identified according to both their formal (semantic) andstructural (syntactic) elements.The formal attributes of the melodramatic imagination in Nigerian videosThe formal attributes of the melodramatic imagination in Nigerian videos tend to confirm thegeneral definitions of melodrama as formulated by numerous scholars in the field (cf. Langford2005; Singer 2001), and as emphasized by Jonathan Haynes (2000), Brian Larkin (2008) andMoradewun Adejunmobi (2010) among others in relation to Nollywood. As I will show below,151