VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

quickly, as a way of adapting to fast-changing economic conditions. This fluidity is a resource, butcan also be seen as a weakness. The fluidity and openness of the video industry as a system, in fact,makes it profoundly vulnerable.As Ravi Sundaram emphasizes in his study of piracy in contemporary urban India,as a phenomenon that works on a combination of speed, recirculation and dispersal,pirate products are consumed by the possibility of their disappearance – by moreimitations and versions. This is a constant anxiety in small electronic enterprises, thefirst past the post stays there for only a few months. New copies follow, from rivals andformer collaborators. The doctrine of the many is haunted by its own demise – all thetime. Just as Marx once wrote that the only limit to capital is capital itself, so piracy isthe only agent that can abolish piracy (2010: 138).As I have discussed in the first part of this chapter, in a context like the Nigerian one, wherecopyright regimes were and still are weak, the unregulated imitation and reproduction of productsthat are particularly successful on the market drives the video industry’s informal economy towardsubsequent cycles of saturation and collapse. As noted by Ramon Lobato, from this perspective “itbecomes possible to read piracy [and, I may add, informality] as the quintessential form of freeenterprise” (2009: 22), in which the absence of regulation brings competition to levels thatconstantly menace the survival of the entire system.The last point worth highlighting here is the fact that the line that divides formal and informalsectors within the Nigerian context is anything but rigid. The fluid informal sector is constantlyinteracting with segments of Nigeria’s formal economy, and the sporadic funding of films byprivate banks and corporations is a clear example of this dynamic. 52 At the same time, in theNigerian context the wave of economic formalization through privatization introduced by theStructural Adjustment policies has unexpectedly generated a remarkable growth of informaltransactions and has participated in transforming informality into a back-door route to globalization52 Even if the level of economic engagement of private corporations in Nollywood productions is still very low, someexamples can be found. For instance, Izu Ojukwu has directed four films financed by Amstel Malta beer (Sitanda, WhiteWaters, Cindy's Note and The Child) and Fidelis Duker, Charles Novia, Chico Ejiro and Fred Amata created theassociation “Project Nollywood” which has produced four films thanks to the sponsorship of Ecobank (Fidelis Duker'sSensless, Charles Novia's Caught In The Middle, Chico Ejiro's 100 Days in the Jungle and Fred Amata's Letter to aStranger).56