VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

fieldwork, Nollywood films focus on what preoccupies Nigerian people in their everyday existence,that is, family matters (infertility, infidelity, jealousy, widowhood, polygamy and orphanhood),political problems (corruption, political violence, injustice, ethnic tensions and illicit money-makingpractices) and issues related to the everyday survival in the city (how to make money, how to get ajob, how to get a woman/a man, etc). While the representation of these issues is in most casesinformed by the melodramatic imagination and thus metamorphosed by it, the original concern forthese real, actual, everyday problems makes Nigerian video-makers claim that their films are purelyand simply about reality. As Nelly, an assistant director interviewed in the documentary NollywoodBabylon (2008), says toward the end of the filmyou can never tell the story of Nigeria by propaganda […] You can never say [it] bysending a communication minister to go and talk on CNN. The world is not stupid […]They know politicians can say anything, but they want to see it from the people who arefeeling the pain. And that’s what Nollywood does, that’s what is unique about us, we tellit the way it is. Even though people come out and say they don’t like this, they don’t likethat, we tell it the way it is.This statement is confirmed by what many audiences feel. During fieldwork I conducted numerousinformal conversations with Nigerian videos’ habitual viewers, and most of them were almostliterally repeating Nelly’s words: “Nollywood videos tell it (the reality) the way it is, and this is themain reason why we watch them”.The nature of this realistic representation, however, is not transparent. How can in fact anarrative language be, at the same time realistic and its opposite, that is, melodramatic? Theparticular answer that videos offers to this question constitutes, in my view, one of the most originalfeatures of the film language that Nigerian videos developed. As I will discuss below, the videos’portrayal of reality is strictly connected to their intention to create, through their specific address, amoral collectivity, that is, a unity that goes beyond ethnic and national borders. Before discussingthis aspect of videos’ film language, however, it is important to investigate what I defined as thecontingent realism of Nigerian videos.Because of the restricted production budgets and the limited availability of high quality technicalinfrastructures, many Nigerian videos are defined by the use of natural or minimal lighting, digitalhandy cameras and nonprofessional extras. Natural sounds, when not covered by heavy digitallyrecorded soundtracks, emerge strongly, and often in ways not directly related to the plot (car horns161