VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

time, metaculture tends to develop an autonomous life, which produces specific impacts on the lifeof the object that was initially represented. As the next two chapters will underline, when we applythis model to the case analyzed here, we can observe a similar dynamic. On the one hand, themetaculture of Nollywood produces a representation of the video phenomenon that identifiescorrectly a number of the industry’s defining features. On the other hand, this same metaculture,through processes of essentialization and generalization, produces an original object (the discourseabout Nollywood) whose circulation importantly interacts with the life of the object the metaculturerefers to. This dynamic is explicitly defined by Urban as follow:the culture of the object moves into the response, which in turns determines […] whatnew objects will be produced. Culture here travels from the original object to the newone via the response. In other words, the pathway of the motion is: cultural object metacultural response new cultural object (2001: 240).In this perspective, metaculture becomes the bridge that connects a cultural object to its successivemanifestations. It is in fact by responding to metaculture that the cultural object transforms itselfand acquires new forms and cultural meanings. To have an idea of this kind of dynamic, one canthink at the way newspaper reviews of film and book releases influence the market, which in turninfluences the contents of future films and books. Or similarly, we can think at the way fanzinemagazines and television programs interact with the show business, orienting cultural productiontoward specific aesthetic and narrative tastes.In the first chapter of this section I will analyze the discursive constructions around Nollywoodstarting from the genealogy of the name “Nollywood” itself. My intention is to understand how thediscourse around the video industry has progressively polarized diverging tendencies alreadyexisting within the industry and within the Nigerian public sphere. On one side, we can observe atendency toward internationalization and globalization, which responded positively to theintroduction of the word “Nollywood” and which participated in transforming it into a selfsufficientcommercial brand. On the other, we can observe a tendency which points its attentiontoward the internal differentiation of the video industry and toward the specificity of the Nigerianmedia environment. As I will argue in this chapter, these two opposite poles have created a specificfield of tension within which most Nollywood practitioners had to position (explicitly or implicitly)their work. These two opposite discursive constructions have thus importantly influenced the91