VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

QuestionsNollywood, as a phenomenon, is in itself an open question mark. How did such a successfulmedia industry managed to grow in a context of economic and infrastructural scarcity like the onethat characterized post-Structural-Adjustment Nigeria? How did it manage to conquer the hearts andthe minds of millions of Africans around the world? What are the secrets of its success? What arethe narratives, the aesthetics, the ideologies that this powerful media industry has deployed toachieve such success? What is the future of this industry and what is the role that video films canplay in re-imagining the destiny of a continent often represented through metaphors of failure anddisaster?Many of these questions have already been addressed, and I reported in the previous sections ofthis chapter some of the answers that have been formulated. The existing debate around the videoindustry is rich and diverse. But this does not exhaust the capacity that Nollywood has ofinterrogating us. As I had the privilege to observe directly, the video industry is an extremely fasttransformingentity. You look at it today and tomorrow you might not be able to recognize it. Forthis reason, the scholarly debate is very lively and needs fresh contributions to keep up with theindustry’s accelerative motion. These transformations are probably the aspect of the Nollywoodphenomenon that intrigued me the most. I considered them as a prism through which I couldunderstand some of the behind-the-surface dynamics that traverse the universe of African culturalproductions in the digital era. As I will outline throughout this thesis, these transformations areintrinsically related to the mobility of the videos as cultural products.What is the effect of the unregulated mobility that characterizes Nollywood videos’ circulationon the economy of the industry? What are the rules that regulate this informal economy? How arethey interpreted and discussed and how do they transform over time? These are the questions thatthe first section wants to discuss. They are particularly relevant because they look at the materialconditions of possibility of the industry itself. They try to understand how the industry developedadapting to specific economic, social and political factors and how then the industry respondedwhen these factors transformed. As the first section argues, a transformation in the social andeconomic structure of the industry necessarily provokes a number of modifications in the way thefilms circulate. These transformations modify the social, economic and cultural significance of thefilms themselves. To draft a very general thesis, we can say that the process this section looks at iscircular. Unregulated mobility generates transformations in the economic organization of the37