Nigerian Film Industry Analysis

on the Nigerian film industry. What is remarkable about their writings is how seriously they take the task of bridging the gap between a modern conception of cinema in a context like the US and the chaotic Nigerian cinematographic reality. They discuss at length the reasons why Nigerian movies find it difficult to be accepted in an American context that has not only a highly developed technological conception of film, but is equally snobbish of anything below that standard. The length of Nollywood films, their ambiguous and self-conscious portrayal of African culture and their formats, are amongst the most important reasons they advance for this kind of reception they get in the West (2000, 3).

Between Nigerian films and the tradition of francophone

Across the divide, it is perceptible that they are two worlds apart, each following its own path. This makes the possibility of a workable rapproachement between these two trends seemingly unreachable. Nigerian contexts and audiences are to a large extent totally ignorant of francophone filmic products. With the boom in Nigerian movies however, a lot of Nollywood products are making their way into francophone

Shaka chooses instead the framework of Francophone cinematographic discourse that has dominated African cinema. In my opinion, his work is a mixture of progress and retrogression in African film scholarship.

Modernity and the African cinema (2004), as a publication, makes no secret of the bones it has to pick with scars inflicted by colonialism and their lingering effects on Africans who still remain vulnerable in their dealings with foreigners (Shaka 2004, 9). What Shaka proposes strongly is a conscious effort to assess traditional African institutions in a bid to understand what has continually weakened them. He carries out his research on cinema as a medium, to assess what has changed of the African reality and what still remains as the unchanging substratum. Cinema in this publication is studied from the point of view of how it defines the African identity. He traces how that identity has been presented in colonial film practices and how that same question has evolved in the cinematographic practices that followed. Remarkable in these arguments is Shaka’s lucid assessment of the progress of ambivalence that pits Africa in a constant