New Nollywood: A Sketch of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style

Abstract

Abstract:Recent experimentation by Nollywood producers has encouraged increasing differentiation of film practices as a strategy for contending with a demanding video market. “New Nollywood” refers to a select group of aesthetically sophisticated films intended for a new tiered distribution method, beginning with theatrical release and ending with DVD release. Nigeria’s upscale multiplex cinemas are therefore a starting point for examining what is new—and not so new—in Nollywood. This article argues that New Nollywood films and the cinemas in which they appear appeal directly to spectators’ senses by promising not only a movie and shopping, but also an affective experience closely bound up with global consumerism. The films exhibit a metropolitan vantage point that emphasizes subjects such as airline travel, trendy technology, consumer culture, global pop culture, lifestyle brands, high fashion, and luxury goods. These films advertise their “modernity,” which is not presented as a consolidated order of knowledge and values, but rather as an assemblage of signifiers of city life. Whereas mainstream Nollywood continues to produce strong narratives that resonate with its intended audience, New Nollywood—with its emphasis on images and style—is a direct expression of the cultural and economic forces shaping life in Lagos today.

Producing Nollywood portal films: Navigating precarity through informal social relations and hope

“…From 2006, some filmmakers expanded the industry by producing cinema films. The cinema filmmakers were committed to enhancing the quality of Nollywood films through better attention to production quality (Haynes, 2014; Ryan, 2015; Tsika, 2019). While cinema filmmaking continues to rise as a distinctive Nollywood market, digital distribution, which is the focus of this article, has become the latest layer in the Nollywood ecosystem.…”

The New Nollywood: Professionalization or Gentrification of Cultural Industry

“…In an interview, industry critic Prof. F. Shaka (personal communication, March 22, 2016) and filmmaker T. Benson (personal communication, April 11, 2016) opine that it resulted from criticisms on what is now termed the old Nollywood. Ryan (2015) refers to it as "top-of-the-line" films resulting from sectoring and experimentations aimed at remedying the general fatigue experienced in the industry. New Nollywood developed from newer opportunities available to filmmakers ranging from exposure to other filmmaking standards, to availability of fund and new investors, education, and interactions with corporate organizations.…”

Post-imperial affinities and neoliberal convergences: discourses and practices of collaboration between the Nigerian and the Indian film industries

“…If the history, the economy and also the aesthetics and politics of these two industries were and are profoundly different in many respects (the depth of their respective histories, their relationship with the informal sector of the local economies, their use of digital and celluloid formats, the scale of their economies), over the past decade, they developed a number of astonishing similarities, which manifested themselves most evidently in the industries' trajectories of economic transformation. It is in fact mainly in relation to these aspects that scholars have highlighted the convergences existing between Bollywood and Nollywood: the progressive drive towards diasporic audiences and local elitist viewership in multiplex cinemas, the gradual formalization of the two industries' economic structure, the growing interactions between the two industries and local governmental funding agencies and the increased involvement of global media conglomerations in both production and distribution of Indian and Nigerian films (see Athique and Hill, 2009;Basu, 2010;Ganti, 2012;Govil, 2007;Jedlowski, 2013;Ryan, 2015). In relation to these phenomena, the similarities between the two industries are often so significant that one could almost substitute the term Bollywood with the term Nollywood and achieve valuable analysis of the transformations that have taken place over the past few years in both industries.…”