VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

This ideal of modernity, however, while being, as I just emphasized, “alternative”, is also verymuch “similar” to Western models. It does in fact mimic a model of success very much inspired, ingeneral, by the United States as a symbol of capitalist economic achievement and, in particular, byHollywood movies. Within this context, Western models, while being partially mistrusted becauseof the years of social, economic and political impasse that they implicitly provoked (the post-Structural-Adjustment crisis), are also enthusiastically embraced. The transformations in videos’film language and economic structures that I explored throughout this thesis clearly reflect thisevidence. The Nigerian video industry is in fact moving from a rather peculiar and locally-definedmedia enterprise to something that resembles closely, at least in its intentions, to other instances offilm industry all over the world, and particularly to the Hollywood experience. What the videoindustry (or, better, a section of it) is becoming, then, is a much more formalized and regulatedeconomic initiative compared to what it used to be. And video films (but only the high budgetproductions I have referred to when defining the new wave) are becoming homogenous rather thanheterogeneous cultural products which, instead of being radically open, are progressively becomingdefinable through already-existing generic categories that respond to specific marketing strategiesThis act of embracement of Western-originated models, however, does not carry, at least in myview, the sense of cultural alienation that defined the failure of early projects of modernization. Thisis a projection toward the future that emerged from a local dynamic, that is, from what classicNollywood has represented. It is a projection toward modernity that is independently formulatedand conceived as the result of previous experiences of both failure and reinterpretation ofmodernization projects. It is a tension that belongs to a specific era that Nollywood has, somehow,participated to create: an era, the present one, in which people, places, objects that used to belocated on the periphery of the global system are gaining new geopolitical and geocultural roles inthe general balance of this world.205