Film is globalised, but also regional, defined by socio-political processes that illustrate the interconnectivity between global changes in political and economic power, all-encompassing digital transformations and an arguably worldwide sedimentation of people in terms of their status within an increasingly neo-liberal world order. All this affects changes in regional film policies, creative activities, community ‘uprisings’ in film production and reception and a broad, interactive use of new screen technologies that posit a collectively owned understanding of a place in that world.
In addition to fresh analysis of the meaning and importance (or otherwise) of geographical borders, therefore, we always knew that The Routledge Companion to World Cinema would have to remap economic, political, aesthetic and cultural assumptions that world cinema is subject to value judgments based on criteria for inclusion and exclusion, or even contained within complacent suppositions of what the internet and the wider digital revolution are capable.
This is far from a clichéd reaction against Hollywood by ‘other’ cinemas and much closer to a network of challenges to homogeneity by which filmmakers and film-watchers experience and accept globalisation on their own terms. Broadening our scope, we took on board the fact that thanks to new media, many peoples of the world can now experience international communication and the marginalised can often find a voice, thereby setting examples and aspirations for those who do not yet have that access or possibility.
Film can foster empathy and incite debate by highlighting interdependency and potential. Yet there are also many who lack the technology, who are ‘off the grid’ and unmapped, whose production and consumption of films would also be a concern of this volume. Aiming to balance itself upon the cutting edge of all this contemporary activity, thereby providing an in depth and expert analysis of world cinema from a range of precise coordinates, we divided The Routledge Companion to World Cinema into two sections of twenty chapters each.
The first section is entitled Longitude and is concerned with geographical areas, ways of mapping or remapping the landscape and extent of world cinema. This includes analysis of those films and cinemas that slip between the gaps of conventional geographic categories, revealing themselves as impossible to situate or equally at home in multiple geographic contexts. And the second section is entitled Latitude and is concerned with thematic, theoretical and practical ways of understanding world cinema. Both sections were designed to investigate key themes and crucial areas of enquiry.
Gradually, the structuring of the volume began to take shape around the incoming abstracts that leaned to one section or the other. Our next submission came from Jeffrey Geiger and certainly sharpened the intended focus on new technology and ‘other’ cinemas. Jeffrey Geiger is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His publications include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011), the co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (2nd edition 2013) and Cinematicity in Media History (2013).
This was the abstract he sent us.
Nollywood and the West African Video Revolution: From Regional to Global
This chapter explores the rise of ‘Nollywood’ film and video-making since the 1990s, focusing on the growth of the industry and on regional pressures both within Nigeria and beyond, to videofilms made in nearby countries such as Ghana. As Nollywood has become a global phenomenon and ‘brand’, it has become a byword for ‘the little industry that could’. Structurally and commercially, it appears to lead the way for numerous smaller and emerging regional cinemas, while posing questions, ideologically, about more traditional notions of what constitutes exportable ‘national cinemas’. This essay thus focuses on the ways that Nollywood relates to shifting conceptions of African ‘Third Cinema’ while charting rapid changes taking place in the region.
We were getting there. The book was already coming together. Now where would it take us?