Emelonye, Reginald Obidyke. 2024. Nollywood Cinema: A Disputed Taxonomy and the Analogy to Black American Cinema. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Nollywood is the homogenizing metonym for the Nigerian film industry that emerged from the vestiges of a cinema-based celluloid tradition championed by the Yoruba traveling theatre, and on the back of Okey Ogunjiofor’s 1992 film, Living in Bondage. It attained notoriety for its speed of production, low budgets and the informality of its distribution systems. However, by 2009, it had surpassed Hollywood to become the world’s second largest producer of feature films, behind India’s Bollywood. Since then, it has grown exponentially, overcoming the limitations of the Video Home Systems (VHS) and Video Compact Disk (VCD) formats. It has benefited from international training for its technicians and midwifed the emergence of a ‘New Nollywood’ wave which has created a solid local cinema infrastructure, as well as global online streaming frameworks to show Nollywood films alongside international blockbusters. Hollywood studios and the world’s biggest streaming platforms- such as Netflix, Paramount and Amazon Prime have also set up Nigerian operations which offer bouquets of entirely Nollywood contents and staking enormous investment on the future of the industry. Yet, a reluctance persists, on the part of critics, scholars and some practitioners to accord Nollywood ‘cinema’ status. It has been variously called an ‘empire’, a ‘phenomenon’, a ‘home video industry’; anything else but cinema.

Using a cinema theoretical framework, this study explores the conceptual and philosophical characterisation of the term ‘cinema’, through the lens of film theories by philosophers such as Andre Bazin, Dudley Andrew and Trevor Ponech. It enquires into the constitutive elements for cinema taxonomy and weighs them, using a sceptical and postcolonial critical framework, against the elastic Nollywood paradigm. The finding that “what counts as cinema is up to us”, reinforces this study’s position that the boundaries of cinema should be drawn at the site of consumption as much as the site of production of films, and that Nollywood should be analysed in its own positivity, through a wider, more complex lens which does not ignore the desires of its passionate audience.

This study also attempts a comprehensive historization of the Nigerian film industry, taking a contemporary snapshot of the state of Nollywood, particularly as it concerns the infiltration of Hollywood studios like Netflix, Paramount and Amazon Prime into the Nigerian cultural space. The aim is to juxtapose a similar Hollywood studios’ penetration of two other fiercely independent Black film practices in the world, the politically charged race films of the 1920s and the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. This allows for the exploration of similarities and divergences which will be utilised in conjecturing, to what extent, Hollywood studio’s encounter with Nollywood in the present dispensation will differ from their unpleasant involvement with the African American film movements of the last century.

Finally, although lessons should be learnt from the experience of African American film movements of the last century, this study believes that the relative difference in Nollywood’s make up and in the present information age in which the industry operates may offer more scope for its survival than the race films and blaxploitation films could afford. However, Nollywood’s biggest asset has been its audience and as long as it retains the support of that audience, the industry will survive powerful external interests and rise above its own contradictory quest to fit into western paradigms, to continue adapting, evolving and thriving.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Keywords:	Nollywood, African Cinema, Cinema, Nigerian Film, What is cinema, African American cinema, Blaxploitation, Race Films, black American cinema, New Nollywood, Andre Bazin, Trevor Ponech, Dudley Andrew, Yoruba Traveling Theatre, Hollywood in Africa, Netflix Naija, Amazon Prime Nigeria
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Theatre and Performance (TAP)
Date:	30 November 2024
Item ID:	38040
Date Deposited:	02 Jan 2025 13:07
Last Modified:	02 Jan 2025 13:12
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38040

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