VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

III: People watching a video in a video club in LagosIV. A video rental shop in LagosThroughout this dissertation I tried to define these transformations by analyzing them underdifferent perspectives. In my analysis, the concept of mobility has occupied a central role and it hasprovided an ordering principle to interpret the dynamics that I observed during my fieldwork. Eachof the three sections that compose this dissertation focused on a different aspect of mobility andtried to understand the role that each of them had, on the one hand, in generating the videoindustry’s popular and transnational success and, on the other, in activating the transformativeprocesses that are taking place.In the first section I looked at the economy of the video industry and I closely explored therelationship existing between the production crisis and the specific regimes of mobility thatcharacterized videos’ circulation since the birth of the industry. Within this framework the conceptsof informality and piracy occupy a central role and I thus tried to define their specificity within thevideo industry’s context in order to understand the role they had in shaping Nollywood’s economy.The emergence and growth of the video industry can be largely related to the flexibility thatinformal modes of operation allowed. As I mentioned several times in this dissertation, the industryemerged during one of the hardest crisis of Nigerian economic and political system. It is largelythanks to informal strategies of economic survival that media entrepreneurs with differentbackgrounds managed to develop new business possibilities and created products that quicklyimposed themselves on the local and regional market. Within this framework, informal and piratednetworks of circulation made videos travel long distances and create for the industry a transnationalaudience. However, as I showed throughout the first section, informal production and distributionstrategies and their vulnerability to piracy progressively eroded the industry’s economy. Those whowere initially benefiting from the high level of deregulation of the industry’s economic environmentbecame the most vocal advocates of an increase in videos’ production and circulation’s regulation.195