VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

economic condition. At first glance there are no explicit signs of the harshness that characterizes hislife. He has a beautiful and lovely wife, Merit, and he lives in a comfortable house, as shown bymost of the scenes of the first part of the film shot in Andy's nice living room. But Andy issuffering. His ambitions and expectations are disappointed and the insecurity of his future obsesseshim. He thus gets himself involved in a secret society, that guarantees him huge profits if he acceptsto sacrifice his wife in a money-making ritual. The insecurity of the social and economic situation isprojected within the family, and the violence of urban life is metamorphosed into the violence thatAndy agrees to commit on his own wife.After the success of Nnebue’s film, similar plots became common in Nollywood films. Theydepict the anxiety and instability of urban life but they do it through a transposition within thesphere of the intimate. As Achille Mbembe has emphasised in his essay on the aesthetic of vulgarity(2001), the postcolonial ruling class and the regimes it produces are characterized by the openmanifestation of excess and exaggeration, something close to what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) hasdefined as the grotesque. But, as Brian Larkin has interestingly pointed out, Nollywood films takethis grotesque dimension “away from the figure of the postcolonial dictator and place it back intothe family […] There the grotesque plays out within and between family members, and the densepolitical field Mbembe identifies is sublimated into personal relationships” (2008: 184). Throughthis process, the hardship, the violence and the excesses of the postcolonial condition areemotionally internalized and become the ground for what Brian Larkin identifies as the definingaesthetic of Nigerian melodrama, an “aesthetic of outrage” that uses “spectacular transgression,luridly depicted, to work on the body, generating physical revulsion” (2008: 186). It is through thislanguage of excesses that, according to Larkin, Nigerian videos develop a critic attitude toward thesociety because the revulsion “provides a public witnessing to the sorts of activities people insociety are involved in and, through the bodily reaction to them, enacts a moral commentary onsociety itself” (2008: 186).In the years following the release of Living in Bondage Nigerian videos became extremelypopular all over Africa and throughout the African diaspora. The widespread transnational popularsuccess of the video phenomenon was documented in recent years by a number of academic andnewspaper articles. Nigerian videos started to influence the way people dress and behave in place asdifferent as Zambia (Muchimba 2004), Uganda (Dipio 2008), Tanzania (Boheme forthcoming;Krings 2010b, forthcoming), South Africa and Namibia (Becker, forthcoming). They have becomewidely popular also in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are often screened during28