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A three-day seminar themed ‘Reading and Producing Nollywood: An International Symposium’ opened on March 23 at the University of Lagos. Filmmakers, Academics, students and people with interest in the Nigerian movie industry witnessed the event.

The seminar was put together by the trio of Duro Oni, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, UNILAG; Onookome Okome, lecturer at the University of Alberta, Canada; and Bic Leu, a Fulbright Fellow researching the Nigerian indigenous film industry.

According to Leu, the symposium which started off as Okome’s idea, was aimed at examining the Nigerian movie industry and looking at filmmaking forms, from storytelling to scriptwriting and distribution.

A number of speakers were expected to deliver papers and discuss select topics during the symposium. These included: academics Jonathan Haynes, Carmela Garritano and Ahmed Yerima, Barclays Ayakoroma, of the National Institute for Cultural Orientation, filmmaker Busola Holloway and many others.

Haynes, a professor of African Film, Video and Literature at Long Island University, US, who has done a lot of research on the Nigerian movie industry gave the keynote address, titled, ‘Reading Nollywood as a Popular Art: Class Character and the Campus Film’. “The study of Nollywood is growing radically”, he noted. “Nollywood now deserves to be taken seriously. People dismiss it; foreigners and Nigerians, particularly academics.” He added that “there should be frames of reference [for] describing it”.

According to Haynes, who had co-written an essay with Okome titled ‘Evolving Popular Media’, he found a framework for describing Nollywood and it was based on academic Karin Barber’s position that popular art in Africa is different from that of other regions of the world. “African popular art comes from the people who consume it. Barber talks about this art being of, for, and by the people,” Haynes declared.

He used campus films as the basis of his argument. “American films are not interested in campuses as a situation like Nollywood is”, he noted.

Plenary session

During the plenary session moderated by Garritano from the University of St. Thomas, US, Anulika Agina, Benmigho Awala and Cornelius Onyekaba delivered papers on related topics.

Agina of the Pan-African University, Lagos, discussed ‘Narrative Structure and Storytelling in Nollywood’. Her paper focused on the importance of the three-act structure in storytelling and scriptwriting. “We don’t pay attention to structure. Most films have an intrinsic three-act structure and this is what makes the form work, even though the audience is not conscious of it,” she said.

According to Agina, in a number of Nollywood movies, the first act of a story extends events to reach a climax – even though climax is really a third-act thing. She also canvassed the filmmaking maxim, ‘Show, Don’t Tell’. “In our films, a lot of what we know about the story comes through words. You should see more than you hear,” Agina said. “Ideally, dialogue should be used only when image and sound cannot move a story on. We need script development and editing. Storytellers need to learn how to use sub-plots to develop a story,” she added.

Film is a weapon

Cornelius Onyekaba delivered a passionate paper on ‘Re-telling History and Changing Perceptions Through Movies: A Study of Jeta Amata’s ‘Amazing Grace’.

“Film is a weapon. It is not just entertainment”, he declared, going further to decry the attitude of some producers who are only interested in getting back the money they put into a production. “Filmmaking is more than this,” Onyekaba said.

“Nations have used film to shape their economies,” said the lecturer at the Department of Creative Arts, UNILAG. He noted that there was a time the Chinese shut themselves out in order to recreate themselves as a nation. “Today, China is one of the booming economies of the world,” he said.

Commending ‘Amazing Grace’ (2006) as a study of how the black man’s voice can used to tell the black man’s story, Onyekaba argued that the Nigerian filmmaker is a sculptor and should see himself as such. “Nollywood should assert itself,”, he urged.

Benmigho Awala from the School of Media at the Pan African University delivered a paper on ‘Representation of Political Corruption in Nigerian Home Video Films: A Study of Some Selected Video Films’. He showed how some of the films discussed in the paper, including Tunde Kelani’s Yoruba movie, ‘Agogo Eewo’ (2002), x-rayed the political situation in Nigeria. He examined how a filmmaker like Kelani offers solutions to dealing with corruption by projecting in his films traditional folkloric themes. The seminar ended on Friday, March 25.