Nigerian Video Films

Front Cover
Jonathan Haynes
Ohio University Press, 2000 - Art - 267 pages
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.
 

Contents

Ch 1Introduction
1
Ch 2From Film to Video
37
Nigerian Video Films
51
Improvisations and Transformations in Yoruba Popular Theater
89
A Glimpse in the Cult of the Individual
131
Ethnicity Class Gender
148
A Feminist Reading of Hostages Dust to Dust and True Confessions
165
The War Paradigm of The Great Mistake
192
Ch 9Culture and Art in Hausa Video Films
200
Ch 10Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria
209
Bibliography
243
Contributors
259
Index
261
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

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.