Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Nollywood is Too Big to Ever Die

"Nollywood is too big to ever die: it is the third [now second] largest film industry in the world, as we
like to keep repeating, and it will eventually be seen as one of the world's major film cultures. The story of its beginnings ought to be told with an appropriate level of depth, detail, and accuracy. One hopes that Nollywood will evolve into dazzling glory impossible to imagine at present, but the remarkable extent to which it holds on to and repeats themes, stories, and aesthetics suggests that a lot that will remain fundamental was laid down at or near the very beginning, that some of the early works will remain as classics, and that whatever the future of film in Nigeria turns out to be, it will be recognizable as an extension of what has already been created. To an extraordinary degree, [Kenneth] Nnebue's Living in Bondage (1992), the film that started the Nigerian video boom, contains the seeds of almost everything that followed."
Jonathan Haynes, 2010, 15
"What Is to Be Done?: Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos,"
in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art Films and the 
Nollywood Video Revolution, ed. Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen

1 comment:

  1. Nollywood has greatly improved in recent times. I strongly believe that "it is big to die." Keep pushing.

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