VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

profoundly condition the production processes and the contents of the videos produced. 122 As aresult of this situation, in many cases, directors have to integrate the elements that the reality“imposes” on them into the videos’ narrative structure. In This is Nollywood (2007), for instance,we see the director Bond Emeruwa obliged to cope with power failures, generators’ noise, songsand prayers coming from a mosque near the set (image VIII). All these elements are creativelyintegrated into the film production, and inevitably find their way into the final result.Nigerian videos' addressivity: Constructing a pan-African publicAs the analysis that I developed throughout this chapter evidences, Nigerian videos’ filmlanguage is the result of an original encounter between melodramatic and realist narrative modes.Developing a highly intergeneric and intertextual formula, Nigerian videos have both local andtransnational appeal. Their melodramatic formal attributes make them highly recognizable, whilethe specific meaning of their melodramatic structure and their inclination for realism give themsocial and phenomenological relevance in contexts that share geographically-located historicalexperiences (colonialism, post-Structural-Adjustment crisis, postcolonial [disrupted] processes ofmodernization).As I have emphasized above, the melodramatic imagination’s formal attributes have universalvocation and global circulation. Within the African context, we can find them in traditional oralnarratives as in modern written and theatrical expressions (cf. Barber 2000; Obiechina 1971;Ogundele 2000), in the Indian films that African people have watched since the mid-twentiethcentury as in the local television series, the Latino American telenovelas and the American soapoperas that people consume since television became part of African people’s everyday life. Hence,people are familiar with melodramatic narratives. The popular audiences’ media literacy isprofoundly connected to them; in many cases it is simply based on them. In this sense, for manypeople the melodramatic imagination is the narrative imagination tout-court. The interference ofrealism within this framework, however, gives to this melodramatic imagination a specific accent,something that makes Nigerian videos able to address the audiences in ways that are relevant andfamiliar to them.122 As I mentioned in chapter five, these documentaries have been shot during the period of the production crisis, whichis also the period in which probably the contingent technical problems related to low budgets and tight shootingschedules affected Nigerian videos’ aesthetics the most.164