THEATER RELEASE AS A FIRST OPTION FOR THE AFRICAN FILM CONTENT BY ISRAEL KASHIM AUDU, FOUNDER KADUNA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

 THEATER RELEASE AS A FIRST OPTION FOR THE AFRICAN FILM CONTENT BY ISRAEL KASHIM AUDU, FOUNDER KADUNA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

PAPER PRESENTED DURING THE 4TH KANO INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE FILM FESTIVAL CONFERENCE IN KANO NIGERIA 23RD NOVEMBER 2021 

Email: Ezzykash11@gmail.com 

Abstract

The mode of productive forces has shifted, the aesthetic forms they produce are different, and the technical, financial and institutional infrastructures that organize film production are not reproducing themselves but are in the midst of a deep transformation. The task for scholars has been how to think this change and the split between these new forces and older forms of African popular cinema. There is a tremendous transformation in the creative industry in Africa most especially in Nigeria as such film makers now make films for cinema standard, the audience have continue to embrace the cinema market overtime. The cost of cinema production may be high but it worth doing in the end. This paper will focus on the impact of theater culture in Africa and the need to make it a first option for the African film content and the peculiar ontology of African Cinema.

I want to address three issues before going further. First, both scholars and filmmakers examining recent changes in popular cinemas have focused on the technical and financial infrastructures of distribution that undergird these changes. They argue that these infrastructures organize and delimit what African film and media are aesthetically, socially, politically. This has been a preoccupation of my own research particularly around the emergence of video but recent scholarship has pushed this approach farther analyzing the new digital infrastructures that undergird practices of distribution

 Moreover, this focus on distribution has been augmented as scholars have begun to analyze film festivals and biennials as infrastructural nodes that control (and mediate) forms of cultural production . Overall, this is a focus on the material and cultural infrastructures that support and transmit media rather than on the texts themselves and reveals how these systems exert cultural and political force and are not simply neutral means of moving media around. I focus on these processes but, as will become clear, I argue this is not new. I want to return to the founding of African cinema at the moment of high nationalism to see how these issues were central to the definition of African cinema as a technical and discursive object. African film and media have a peculiar ontology because filmmakers producing them and scholars analyzing them have always focused beyond the film text itself and paid attention to how that text exists within a broader technical, economic, and political environment. This has been a focus in recent turns within film and media studies but its long history in the subcontinent is, perhaps, one of the most innovative aspects of African screen media studies.

Second, in drawing out this history I want to move beyond normative binaries that have organized polemics between (a largely francophone) African cinema, what I am going to refer to as festival cinema  and what I will term popular cinema. This refers to the cinemas that emerged in Ghana and Nigeria from the 1990s on Ghannywood (Ghanaian film), Nollywood (English language Nigerian film) and Kannywood (Hausa language Nigerian film). In the 1990s and 2000s these two cinema practices were often at loggerheads with both scholars and filmmakers engaged in polemics though this has lessened in recent years. The problem with this polemic is that it focused on differences producing reified oppositions and eliding continuities. It also operated with a restricted definition of film in Africa in that it largely ignored a much broader cinematic ecology, colonial and postcolonial mobile educational cinemas, the continuing presence of foreign film (U.S., Indian, French and Chinese films): and emergent art-world cinemas. What made these polemics so intense is that behind them lay ambitions for the possible futures for modern African subjects in Nigeria.

 One was progressivist, engaged with modern artistic currents from elsewhere, artistically and intellectually modernist, socially and intellectually elite. The other emerged from the crucible of the popular and the informal, representing what Ashis Nandy refers to as the “unintended city” that overwhelmed the modernist imagination and underwent an “incomplete modernization”. This distinction is real, so far as it goes. But it asserts fixed categories when in fact there is much movement between them, and it presumes the centrality of these two cinemas at the expense of the educational, the foreign and the art-world, each of which mobilizes their own forms of ambition, identity and desire. To understand the cinematic as a cultural and political form in Africa it is necessary to take this broader ecology into account.

Third, I turn from this more general discussion of infrastructures of distribution and exhibition in the context of film and media history in Africa to a more narrow focus on “new Nollywood” cinema in Nigeria. In particular, I comment on recent discussion on the production of technically sophisticated, “international standard” images in New Nollywood films and the complicity of these images with contemporary neo-liberalism . The material nature of the image whether low or high quality is not simply an aesthetic choice by filmmakers but is the technical aftereffect of systems of distribution. And as those systems have become the focus of aesthetic and political debate so too has the status of the image and its quality. Earlier popular cinema was seen to be technically poor, but because it was distributed broadly to all strata of society and because it addressed tensions at the heart of everyday Nigerian society those poor images were, for some, a material embodiment of their egalitarianism and accessibility. New Nollywood cinema, by contrast, is technically superior, but its high resolution, sophisticated lighting and clear sound is seen, again, by some, as the formal expression of a cinema oriented to elites. Borrowing from urban studies, we can see this as a kind of enclave cinema, a gated reserve that provides a way of living that matches a global middle class (“international standard”) but only by excluding the popular classes. There is much to agree with in this depiction. However, I wish push against it by taking seriously the ambition for technical excellence and narrative sophistication as a political as well as a cultural goal. The desire for technical excellence needs to be understood as something more than a formal expression of neo-liberal capital.

The peculiar ontology of African Cinema

In 1973, Third World filmmakers from across Africa and Latin America met in Algiers in a historic congress to produce a series of resolutions defining the concept of Third World Cinema. Coming just after the formation of the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (Fepaci) in 1969 this was a collective effort of developing nations to fight against cultural imperialism by establishing a progressive popular film industry. It came after the establishment of the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC, Carthage Film Festival), the first film festival of its kind in Africa and gave rise to Fespaco, the dominant film festival in West Africa. The congress was followed by two others in Algiers in 1975 and Niamey in 1982. The aim of these congresses was to put forth a series of resolutions laying out a blueprint for a cinema in the Third World and in Africa in particular  and their resolutions remain canonical statements about the relation between culture and decolonization.

The first sentence of the 1973 resolution on the state of cinema begins: “So called ‘underdevelopment’ is first an economic problem with repercussions on the social and cultural sphere” As a statement on cinema this is an interesting opening. The roots of nationalist African cinema lay in political economy, in the analysis of an economic system of dispossession and the role of cinema economically and culturally in that dispossession. “To analyse such a development” the resolution continues, “we must refer to the dialectics of capitalism on a world scale”. Political economy generates a peculiar ontology for cinema because it displaces the cinematic. Under this analysis film can never refer to either text or the physical substance of celluloid alone but is dispersed into a broader political economy “capitalism on a world scale”. This is what I mean by its peculiar ontology, that in this lineage of critical thought film is displaced at the moment it is brought into focus. The very meeting designed to focus attention on the cinematic text incorporated the question of infrastructure into the object of African cinema and, I am arguing, set in motion a concern for the platforms that allow circulation which continues to today. James Genova has recently made a similar argument in his detailed recounting of the struggle between the first generation of African filmmakers and the French government in the origins of festival cinemas. He argues that African filmmakers at this time were not just concerned with issues of representation (though this was an important focus) but with the “cinema industrial complex” as a whole. He cites the filmmaker and theorist Haile Gerima on this: “I believe that the right to express one’s own story is the battleground. Now I have become more realistic that films are nothing without the power of distribution, and I have become more realistic about the economic aspects of cinema". 

The concern for the infrastructural bases of cinema can be seen in the fact the 1973 congress was broken down into three separate sections each issuing their own set of recommendations. The first examines cinema’s role in the cultural alienation of societies and the need to develop a revolutionary alternative. The second focuses on production and stresses the need “to provide revolutionary filmmakers with national cinema infrastructures”. The third analyzes distribution and recommends the creation of a Third World Cinema Office to organize the distribution of revolutionary films from across the Third World. Genova argues that the founding figures of Fepaci Paulin Vieyra, Med Hondo, and Ousmane Sembène realized that without command of the material structures of cinema “any progress in the representational realm would be fleeting and reversible”. This is why the second meeting of Fepaci (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes) in 1975 and the third in Niamey Manifesto in 1982 again reiterated the need to understand cinema in a broader capacity as comprising “the exploitation of cinema theatres, the importation of films, technical infrastructure, and training”.

This history is provocative. It complicates easy assertions about the textualist bias of African cinema studies that is different from and opposed to, a social scientific concern for material structures. The analysis of film form remains important but at the very emergence of African cinema there was already a far more capacious idea of the cinematic which rejects these dichotomies. In his programmatic essay, “What is Cinema for Us?” the noted Mauritanian director Med Hondo excoriates the “domination” of African audiences by foreign images and affirms the ways of life they promote and calls for the production of films by Africans addressing African realities. But he also calls for a “radical change” in production and distribution networks, and that control of images demands control of infrastructure at the same time. The contemporary material turn in screen studies is prefigured in this longer history of African cinema. It is not a repudiation of that history, it is an extension of it.

Finally, The rise of video based popular cinemas in Nigeria, Ghana and elsewhere in the 1990s again brought the issue of platform into central focus. In its early days, these productions were known as “home videos” but because that term referred to something quite different in the U.S. and U.K., Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, writing the first works on the subject, referred to them by the oxymoron “Nigerian Video Films”. This was a cinematic form screened on television and almost never at the cinema, it was a film industry that used no film. Video was transgressive in that it upset established boundaries and, like all transgressive objects, calls the nature of those boundaries into question. Fespaco, the premier African film festival banned all films shot on video in an attempt to impose order on what the definition of a “film” should be, in doing so highlighting the epistemic, cultural, technical and institutional differences between these cinemas. But, even as they did so, they made the platform that carried feature length stories into an object of dense cultural politics and conflict. Contemporary scholarly anxiety over the rise of streaming services, multiplexes, and satellite television stations, is an extension of this same history one that places systems of distribution and the material structures of film at the center of analysis. We can all agree that theater release should be our first option for the African film content because it worth it and with the presence of film festivals in Nigeria the theater or cinema culture is kept alive.

REFERENCE ;

* B. Larkin, « Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Media and the Infrastructure of Piracy in Nigeria », Public Culture, vol. 16, n° 2, 2004, p. 289-314 ; Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham, Duke University Press, 2008 ; « Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria », in J. Haynes (dir.), Nigerian Video Film. Revised and Expanded Edition, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000, p. 209-242.

* Jedlowski cites much of this work in the introduction. See the Haynes essay in this volume and: M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities in Old and New Nollywood », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, 2015, p. 31-53 ; « Streaming Quality, Streaming Media », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), 

* A Companion to African Cinema, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 2019, p. 219-243 ; C. Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013 ; J. Haynes, « Between the Informal Sector and Transnational Capitalism: Transformations of Nollywood », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), 

* A Companion to African Cinema, op. cit., p. 244-268 ; A. Jedlowski, « African Media and the Corporate Takeover: Video Film Circulation in the Age of Neoliberal Transformations », African Affairs, vol. 116, n° 465, 2017, p. 671-691 ; C. Ryan, « New Nollywood: A Sketch of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, p. 55-76 ; J. L. Miller, Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Video film Industry, Londres, British Film Institute, 2016 ; N. A. Tsika, Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015. See also R. Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Londres, British Film Institute, 2012.

* On festivals the major contribution here is L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Biennials as an infrastructure for the art market and art film is receiving increasing attention. Y. Konaté et R. G. Elliot (trad.), « Dak’Art: The Making of Pan-Africanism and the Contemporary », Art in Translation, vol. 5, n° 4, 2013, p. 487-529. Dovey also discusses this turn toward biennials in her book.