VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

The video industry developed along the line of contact between these two economies. Its structure isrhizomatic, 30 as that of most of informal economies, and it relies upon the unregulated interactionsbetween a large number of small segments. While film industries elsewhere in the world tend to beorganized around the activity of a few big production and distribution companies, the Nigerianvideo industry comprises a constellation of small enterprises, which disappear and reappearaccording to the economic condition. While the flexibility of this structure made the video industryable to emerge within an economically-adverse environment, the emergence of the production crisispushed Nigerian video entrepreneurs to rethink the economic basis of their activity.As a matter of facts, within the widely informal environment in which the video industry hasdeveloped, the unregulated, and often illicit, reproduction and circulation of goods were the rulerather than the exception. The (pirated and informal) modes of circulation that emerged from thissituation generated two opposite results. While, on the one hand, by multiplying videos’ circulation,they transformed Nollywood into a locally and internationally successful phenomenon, on the otherhand, by excluding original producers from enjoying the benefits of videos' success, they paved theway for the production crisis that developed in the past few years. As a result, while the industryachieved a global recognition, the economic fragility of its success provoked a growing anxiety,concentrated around issues of piracy and copyright protection.This chapter intends to investigate the causes of this anxiety and the role that piracy has had incatalysing them while shaping the economy of the industry. To do so, it is important, first of all, toanalyze and understand the elements that brought to the production crisis and, particularly, the rolethat the introduction of new digital technologies has played within this context. While media piracyhas existed in Nigerian since the emergence of new recording technologies in the mid-1970s (cf.Larkin 2004), the introduction of faster and cheaper digital reproduction facilities has made illicitreproduction a much more affordable business. The emergence of the production crisis and theanxiety about videos’ modes of circulation that followed it are thus deeply related to thetechnological and infrastructural environment within which the video industry operated.30 I borrow the concept of “rhizome” from Deleuze and Guattari (1988). According to their definition, “unlike trees ortheir roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of thesame nature […] the rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor to the multiple. […] it constitutes linear multiplicitieswith n dimensions having neither subject nor object (1988: 21).46