Cultural Nationalism: The ‘Nollywoodization’ of Nigerian Cinema

Abstract

For over a century, the motion picture has been an empowering immediacy that has dominated the entertainment space. Its enduring propensity for propagating socio-political and cultural biases is, perhaps, one of its greatest attributes. In particular, its affinity for social change makes it a viable tool for cultural nationalism, which is often expressed as a conceptual and aesthetic recourse to the so-called motherland, especially in the face of threatening cultural annihilation.

The ideological and aesthetic imperatives of Nigeria's evolving national feature film culture, internationally dubbed ‘Nollywood’, are derivatives of a distinct and unique civilization. While the rest of the world utilizes the 35mm celluloid production format, Nigeria's preference in the last thirteen years is for the relatively cheaper, technically prosaic and artistically less prestigious video format, and has been globally acclaimed the most prolific and revolutionary of such a model.

This paper identifies the conceptual and aesthetic markers of Nigeria's video-based cinema as a predominant means through which a nation tells its own stories. It also examines Nollywood’s influence on nationhood vis-à-vis the hegemonic Western world cinematographic culture, with a view to characterizing its potentials for the purpose of redefining, reinforcing and unifying the core values and social structures of the nation.