VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Nollywood is normally consumed, shopping malls and multiplexes express a spatial-temporal gapin the everyday life of Lagosians, a gap between the hardship of everyday urban life in Nigeria andthe dream of Lagos as a global city. The new wave films screened in these spaces inhabit this gap,and provide to the audience voices and moving images to populate its imaginaries.The encounter between new screening spaces and the new Nigerian cinema productions that areemerging in the past few years is surrounded by a cosmopolitan aura that gives the audience thefeeling of being part of a larger world, something that brings them beyond the limits of theireveryday experience and projects them toward an imagined universe of mobile possibilities.However, these cosmopolitan imaginaries are defined and shaped by a complex system of socialdifferentiation and discrimination. Because of their high entry price and their geographic location inthe city, multiplexes are accessible only to specific segments of the population. And the filmsscreened in them differ from the mainstream Nollywood productions by incarnating the dreams andfears of an elite middle class rather than those of a large popular audience.Within this context, the question that Jeff Himpele has posed in his study of film circulation inurban Bolivia becomes relevant: “How does circulation itself distribute difference by dispersingaudiences?” (1996: 48). New media formats and new screening venues generate new audiences,which in return consume these products and frequent these new social spaces to seek a confirmationof their social status. Within this context, the “multiplexes commodify new social aspirations,prioritizing cleanliness, safety and congeniality, and providing a sensory environment that distancesthe well-off consumer from the immediate past of fear, discomfort and scarcity in public space”(Athique 2011: 155).Going transnational and going back to cinema are two movements on which a part of theindustry is concentrating most of its efforts. As I have just underlined, there are reasons to believethat that these transformations will bring the video industry away from the popular audience thatmade its emergence possible. But this might equally not be the case. The future of the industry is anopen question mark. Important transformations are underway and it is probably too early to make acoherent evaluation of their impact on the Nigerian mediascape.While I will address the issues that this open question mark leaves unanswered throughout thefollowing chapters, the words of one of the distributors I interviewed during my research can offer aconclusion to this section. It suggests a hopeful future for the video industry, while recognizing thecomplexity of the present situation:85