Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.
The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video’s materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.
Jonathan Haynes is associate professor in the Humanities Division at Southampton College of Long Island University. He is the author of The Humanist as Traveler, The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater, and (with Onookome Okome) Cinema and Social Change in West Africa. More info →
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Release date: August 2000
287 pages
Rights: World
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Release date: August 2000
287 pages
Rights: World
Colonial Meltdown
Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
By Moses E. Ochonu
Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression.
History | Africa | West · History | Modern | General · Colonialism and Decolonization · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa · African Studies · Great Depression
The Movies Grow Up
1940–1980
By Charles Champlin
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Foreword by Alfred Hitchcock
Nearly 200 photos enhance Champlin’s readable, fascinating survey of the movies from the Golden Age up through the year 1980. According to Champlin, movies are the art form of our time—perhaps even the art form of this century. With this revised and enlarged edition of his book, one of the most comprehensive and eloquent works on film is available once again.
History · Media Studies · Film and Video - History and Criticism
Framing Shakespeare on Film
How the Frame Reveals Meaning
By Kathy M. Howlett
The aesthetics of frame theory form the basis of Framing Shakespeare on Film. This groundbreaking work expands on the discussion of film constructivists in its claim that the spectacle of Shakespeare on film is a problem-solving activity.Kathy Howlett demonstrates convincingly how viewers’ expectations for understanding Shakespeare on film can be manipulated by the director’s cinematic technique.
Media Studies · Literature · Shakespeare · Literary Criticism, Theater · British Literature · Film and Video - History and Criticism
Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century
Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution
Edited by Mahir Şaul and Ralph A. Austen
African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema.
Film and Video - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Africa · African Studies · Media History · African Film · African Literature
