Small Screen Cinema

Informality and the Nigerian Video Industry’s Economy

In the debates existing around the definition of the economy of the Nigerian video industry, as well as in those related more generally to the analysis of West African economies, the word “informality” appears countless times. But its use and definition have often been contested. ³ As Janet Roitman has emphasized, “the adjective ‘informal’ has become a catch-all term to describe many economic pursuits and logics that are part and parcel of capitalist relations in both ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’” (2005: 19). This widespread use has made the definition of the term blurred, almost inconsistent. While Roitman goes so far as to describe the term as “misleading” (ibid), I would prefer to clarify why I still think that the term has an important operational value and what I mean when I use it.

In what concerns the video industry, the indiscriminate use of this attribute has participated in creating a particular representation of the video phenomenon, which has widely circulated in the global cinema arena through film festivals and documentaries. ⁴ According to this representation, the video industry is a largely deregulated economic venture in which improvisation and unprofessionalism are the rule rather than the exception. Within this framework, the specificities that define the industry’s modes of operation are generally seen as the contingent result of a number of social and economic factors and the industry is considered as an exploitative system regulated by a “get-rich-quick” mentality. ⁵

This definition of the video industry’s modes of operation has provoked numerous reactions within the industry’s environment (Ayorinde 2004). It has in fact been seen as an attempt to disqualify and marginalize Nollywood, defining it as a second-class film industry. As Kunle Afolayan underlined, referring to this discourse,

If they are celebrating the fact that Nigeria has managed to find its space in the history of cinema creating its own way of doing it, then it’s cool! But if they are trying to say that this is the best thing that could happen for a cinema industry in Africa, then I think they are wrong. (pers. comm., January 15, 2010)

As this debate emphasizes, the definition of informality within the context of the video industry’s economy needs to be addressed carefully in order to avoid the risk of transforming it into a term perceived as disqualifying. At the same time, as I underlined above, this is a term whose definition can importantly help us in understanding the specificities of the video industry’s modes of operation.

In common use, “informal” has become synonymous with unstructured or unorganized systems of economic relations, and it is often connected to the idea of marginality and illegality. However, a closer analysis of the phenomena that are classed as informal shows that, in most cases, informal economies and informal networks of circulation are highly organized, they often occupy a central position in the economy of a country (particularly in the African context but also in European regions like Southern Italy or in the post-Soviet area) and they constantly fluctuate between regimes of legality and illegality, foregrounding the fact that spheres of lawfulness and illicitness are socially constructed. In the case of the Nigerian video industry, this is illustrated by the fact that, even if the economic structure of the industry is largely unregulated, the relationships between the numerous economic actors involved in it (“marketers,” ⁶ producers, directors, actors, technicians) are robustly structured. When the informal (but structured) systems of rules that regulate the interactions between these actors enter a period of transformation, violent conflicts can erupt, as shown by several episodes in the recent past.

As Roitman suggests, when we talk about “informal” we mainly refer to “unregulated” or “unofficial” economic activities (2005: 19–20), that is, activities that are not monitored and that do not fall into the fiscal framework of the nation-state. However, this does not exhaust the meaning of informality in the present context. When I refer to informal modes of production and distribution, I do not mean only that these modes of production and distribution are unregulated. This would be a negative definition, whereas it might be more useful for this discussion to suggest a definition that positively identifies the specific aspects of informality within the video economy.

Hamid Naficy’s description of exilic modes of film production within the Iranian diaspora may be relevant for an analysis of the Nigerian video industry. These modes of production, which he defines as “interstitial” or “artisanal,” “operate both within and astride the cracks and fissures of the system, benefiting from its contradictions, anomalies and heterogeneity” (1999: 134). This definition is useful to understand how the Nigerian video entrepreneurs act within an economic system that does not foresee their existence. They are obliged to adapt and creatively react to a context in which their activity is systematically undermined by the authorities. Nollywood has in fact developed without any governmental support, in a context that has often considered the industry a problem rather than a resource for the development of Nigerian economy and society. The interstitiality of Nigerian video entrepreneurs’ modes of operation is, thus, a constitutive element of the informality that defines the economy of the industry.

Another central feature to be considered is the rhizomatic organization of the industry’s economy, and of informal transactions in general. While formal economies tend to have cephalic structures, in which it is possible to identify an organizational centre, informal economic systems tend to work according to a segmented structure, in which networks of reciprocal connections interact with each other through a myriad of nodal points and transform themselves constantly, in unmonitored but meaningful ways. This aspect implicitly foregrounds another defining attribute of Nollywood’s informality: fluidity. The economy and the structure of the video industry transform quickly, as a way of adapting to fast-changing economic conditions. This fluidity is a resource, but can also be seen as a weakness. The fluidity and openness of the video industry as a system, in fact, makes it profoundly vulnerable.

As Ravi Sundaram emphasizes in his study of piracy in contemporary urban India,

As a phenomenon that works on a combination of speed, recirculation and dispersal, pirate products are consumed by the possibility of their disappearance—by more imitations and versions. This is a constant anxiety in small electronic enterprises, the first past the post stays there for only a few months. New copies follow, from rivals and former collaborators. The doctrine of the many is haunted by its own demise—all the time. Just as Marx once wrote that the only limit to capital is capital itself, so piracy is the only agent that can abolish piracy. (2010: 138)

In a context like the Nigerian one, where copyright regimes were and still are weak, the unregulated imitation and reproduction of products that are particularly successful on the market drives the video industry’s informal economy toward subsequent cycles of saturation and collapse. As noted by Ramon Lobato, from this perspective “it becomes possible to read piracy [and, I may add, informality] as the quintessential form of free enterprise” (2009: 22), in which the absence of regulation brings competition to levels that constantly menace the survival of the entire system.

The last point worth highlighting here is the fact that the line that divides formal and informal sectors within the Nigerian context is anything but rigid. The fluid informal sector, as previously defined, is constantly interacting with segments of Nigeria’s formal economy, and the occasional funding of films by private banks and corporations is a clear example of this dynamic. At the same time, in the Nigerian context the wave of formalization through privatization introduced by the Structural Adjustment policies has unexpectedly generated a remarkable growth of informal transactions and has participated in transforming informality into a back-door route to globalization (Meagher 2003: 59). Informal markets all over sub-Saharan Africa have, in fact, come to play a pivotal role in generating technological and cultural innovation through the introduction into the public arena of last-generation products smuggled in from abroad.

Within the context of the Nigerian media environment, then, informality can be defined as an economic mode of operation that is interstitial, segmented, fluid, rhizomatic, structurally vulnerable, and that occupies a central rather than marginal position on the wider landscape of the Nigerian economy. This informality, and the mobility of technologies, contents, and narratives that it allowed, has had a fundamental role in activating the processes of remediation that generated Nollywood’s specific media format. As underlined by Brian Larkin (2008), in fact, since the end of the 1970s the informal/pirate circulation of new media technologies and content in Nigeria has created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the video industry itself.

Cinema and Television: Notes on the Nigerian Media Environment

Because of its size and its political and economic influence in the subregion, Nigeria has always been at the avant-garde of media development in sub-Saharan Africa, and was in fact the second sub-Saharan African country where a film screening was organized (in 1903, after Senegal in 1900) and the first to introduce television (in 1959). However, while cinema technology appeared early in the country, it wasn’t until 1970 that the first Nigerian film, Kongi’s Harvest, was produced (Haynes 1995: 98). Likewise, television was under strict state control (both at the national and at the federal-state level) until the market was liberalized in 1992 (Esan 2009). Hence, in Nigeria the development of both cinema and television was profoundly influenced, as in many other areas of the world, by political power structures (colonial in the case of early cinema, and postcolonial for TV).

The history of cinema and television in Nigeria is wide and complex and there is not enough room to discuss it in depth in this article (see Balogun 1984; Esan 2009; Haynes 2000; Larkin 2008). For this reason I will emphasize here only the historical aspects that are relevant to the present discussion. In regards to cinema, it is interesting to first note that film consumption in Nigeria has been historically dominated by foreign products. As emphasized by Oduko in 1980, “a study of films screened in Lagos theatres during a two-weeks period . . . showed that out of 246 films screened, only 2% were Nigerian, 25% were of Western origin, 31% were Indian and 42% were from Hong Kong” (1980, reported in Odukomaiya 2005: 43). Film distribution was dominated by entrepreneurs of foreign origin (mostly Nigerian citizens of Lebanese descent), and it remained so also after the Indigenization Decree approved in 1975 to boost local control over film production and distribution. Nigerian productions were thus at the margins of local networks of film distribution, and Nigerian filmmakers, who in most cases had backgrounds in traveling theater, tended to distribute their films independently. The director would typically accompany their film around the country, protecting the copy from piracy and controlling the incomes that the screenings would produce.

With the progressive enforcement of the Indigenization Decree, the number of imported films was drastically reduced, ⁷ but this did not lead to a proportional growth in local productions. On the contrary, the decree led to an explosion of pirate cinema theaters screening foreign films. ⁸ However, the economic crisis brought about by the application of Structural Adjustment policies and the spread of social insecurity that followed it progressively eroded cinema-going culture in Nigeria. In the early 1990s only a few cinema halls were still open in Lagos, while most of them had been transformed into churches and shopping malls. ⁹

While the cinema market in Nigeria was largely dominated by foreign products, the first television channel, created in 1959, was introduced as part of the nationalist project and, at least in the intentions of its founders, it was supposed to show mainly local programs. Nigeria was at that time still a British colony, and the political parties fighting for independence considered television as a tool for the transformation of Nigeria into a modern independent nation. Within this history, what is particularly relevant for my analysis is the way in which the introduction of television participated in shaping specific viewing practices. When the first Nigerian channel started broadcasting, in fact, only a very small percentage of the Nigerian population could actually afford a television set, and those who could were concentrated in the main urban conglomerations in the southwestern region of the country, Lagos and Ibadan. As reported by Oluyinka Esan, an important study conducted by the station in 1962 established the difficulties faced by rural audiences in accessing local programs (2009: 49). As a result, the regional government started a campaign to introduce community viewing centers in small villages. “At these venues television sets were procured for the community, powered by petrol generators and located in central places where villagers could assemble to watch” (Esan 2009: 49). As this example shows, then, since its early stages television was not a technology destined for individual or private use. It was instead a social experience or, as Larkin suggests in his analysis of the introduction of radio in Nigeria, a “public technology” (2008: 48). There was “a measure of communal reception” (Esan 2009: 40) which made the Nigerian experience of television closer to that of cinema-going: a crowd would assemble in front of a screen (in this case a small one) to share a space, a soundscape, a specific atmosphere, and inevitably a number of comments and impressions about the contents of the images projected on the screen.

In the early years, and up until the end of the 1980s, television was controlled by state authorities. It had a mainly educational function, and it was largely used as a tool of political propaganda. However, the already mentioned economic crisis that followed the application of the Structural Adjustment policies affected also the economy of television broadcasting. The budget for local productions had to be cut, pushing the Nigerian Television Authority to interrupt the production of Nigerian series and to augment the importing of cheap foreign television programs. Thus, from the mid-1980s, the production value of local programs began to drop, the audiences started to be disappointed and most of the professionals that participated in making the success of early productions possible moved toward new job opportunities outside the national television. In 1992 the government decided to deregulate broadcasting and to open the television market to private investment. This was part of a global trend toward liberalization imposed by the International Monetary Fund, but it was also the first move by the government to try to resurrect the fortunes of the Nigerian television sector. However, even though deregulation was introduced in 1992, private channels started to become competitive only four to six years later.

Between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s, all these factors (progressive collapse of cinema-going culture, decline of national television production, the slow take-off of private television) participated in creating a gap within the Nigerian mediascape, a gap that Nollywood tried to fill.

Small Screen Cinema: Defining the Specificity of Nollywood’s Media Format

When in 1992 Kenneth Nnebue produced Living in Bondage—widely acknowledged as the first breakthrough Nollywood hit—and distributed it straight to video in the Nigerian market, the emergence of a new media format was sanctioned and a product that could fill the gap left by cinema and television seemed to have emerged. ¹⁰ Some of the attributes of previous media experiences in the country were remediated into something new, and this hybrid product managed to adapt well to the specificities of Nigeria’s post–Structural Adjustment society and economy.

The history of Nollywood has been narrated several times (see, e.g., Haynes 2000 and Barrot 2008), and I do not intend to reproduce it once again in this article. What interests me here, instead, is to construct a genealogy of the Nollywood media format to point out its specificities. Nollywood is the result of a complex process in which global modernity has been recycled through the prism of the local (cf. Sundaram 1999). It is the result of simultaneous dynamics of remediation, hybridization, and contamination that characterize the postcolonial metropolis. As AbduMaliq Simone emphasized, “If production possibilities are limited in African cities, then existent materials of all kinds are to be appropriated—sometimes through theft and looting; sometimes through the ‘heretical’ uses made of infrastructures, languages, objects, and spaces; sometimes through social practices that ensure that available materials pass through many hands” (2004: 214). What are, then, the specific features of this “heretical” media format?

First of all, a defining aspect of Nollywood is its mode of circulation. Nollywood videos are, in fact, products that are directly distributed to markets (in the first few years via VHS cassettes, later on VCD and DVD). This mode of circulation authorized Nollywood producers to provide local content to an audience disappointed by the poor quality of television programs. This content was provided in a format that, in an era of widespread social insecurity, could be watched without leaving the comfort of the family’s compound or of the local neighborhood.

Nigerian videos became most popular among the lowest classes of the Nigerian society, who could not always afford to buy original copies. Thus, local rental shops, and video clubs (the so-called video parlors; see Okome 2007), as opposed to private homes, became the most popular viewing venues. In these places, as in the community viewing centres I mentioned earlier, the audience would experience a communal rather than an individual reception, something closer to the experience of watching a film in a theater hall rather than in a private living room. If since the beginning of the 1980s the commercialization of VHS recorders and pirated cassettes of foreign films had created the space for the growth of rental shops and video clubs, Nollywood videos consolidated this viewing practice, transforming it into the mainstream vector of circulation of locally produced contents.

The informality of this mode of circulation was also related to Nigerian filmmakers’ aforementioned practice of distributing films independently. While at the time of celluloid, film directors were privately bringing their films around the country to better control piracy and screening revenues, in the VHS era the straight-to-video strategy allowed them to bypass the restriction imposed by the crisis of television budgets and by the collapse of theater halls. On one hand, this informal mode of circulation reduced the availability of the product in media markets (a director could not go as far in distributing his film as an official celluloid distributor could do, and a VHS marketer could hardly reach the same amount of people that would have access to a television channel), but on the other, it proportionally augmented the director/producer’s revenues as it reduced the number of intermediaries involved in the process.

In this way, Nollywood’s video format borrowed something from the modes of circulation and exhibition that characterized celluloid cinema and early television in Nigeria (communal reception and informal distribution). But at the same time it introduced some specific elements, such as a new spatio/temporal relationship with the audience. The video format could travel and be screened independently from television time schedule and censorship acceptance. This shift implicitly allowed Nollywood videos to bypass the postcolonial state’s infrastructures of control. No censorship board was in fact ready to deal with this new media format, and even if there were already censorship offices that had the mandate to monitor television and celluloid production, nobody was sure about the category in which the new medium had to fall. A new censor board was thus created in 1994, but as the figures of its first years of activity show, it took some time for it to become effective. ¹¹

In relation to cinema, Nollywood videos introduced a shift in terms of budget and technology. Video films were inevitably much cheaper to produce, and digital technology much easier to use than celluloid. Filmmaking, thus, became an extremely accessible activity and videos became potentially a tabula rasa for the reformulation of the Nigerian public sphere. At the same time, the fact that videos were typically watched in communal settings increased their capacity to catalyze public debate. With their complex combination of portability and communality they became an original node of articulation between private and public spheres.

Nollywood’s “heretical” recombination of cinema and television generated what I call here a “small screen cinema.” Accessible, interstitial, and informal in its modes of production, portable in its materiality, communal in its modes of exhibition, difficult to regulate and thus accidentally political in its circulation, Nollywood managed to create a formula that responded to the challenges of the local reality. As the result of processes of remediation, Nollywood appropriated “the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media . . . to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 68). And exactly its ability to act “in the name of the real” made it locally and continentally successful.

Toward the Formalization of the Video Industry’s Economy: The New Distribution Framework and Its Limits

In the past few years, the section of the Nigerian video industry producing English-language films entered a deep production crisis. This crisis is probably bringing Nollywood beyond the video-boom-era that made it popular all over the continent. The reasons for the production crisis are numerous and there is no room here to analyze them in depth (see Jedlowski, forthcoming). What interests me within the framework of this discussion is the fact that the crisis produced a number of consequences that are importantly transforming the video industry’s economic structure, making videos move toward a progressive remediation into different media formats.

These transformations are related to the introduction (and, partly failed, application) by the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) of a new distribution framework to regulate videos’ circulation within and beyond the Nigerian borders. According to the Censors Board’s analysts, the informal organization of the video industry’s economy is one of the main causes of the production crisis (Agbedo 2009). Informal (and often illicit) circulation in fact affects the industry’s revenues, thus implying a reduction of new productions’ budgets. The average quality of new videos becomes poorer and audiences lose their interest in the product, pushing the industry into a deeper economic disarray. As the General Director of the NFVCB emphasized, “it is distribution that drives contents, not the other way around. Contents always find their way . . . but it is distribution that monetize their circulation . . . and monetization is what helps creating better contents in the future!” (Mba, pers. comm., February 4, 2010).

As a consequence of this logic, the new framework imposes a license on all distributors (from the national to the local level, from the wholesale market to the video club) in order to monitor videos’ circulation and protect its licit monetization (NFVCB 2007). License fees vary according to the portion of the market a specific distributor wants to focus on (national, regional, local) and thus promote the formation of a pyramidal economic structure in which the wider the portion of distribution one wants to control, the higher the license fees he or she has to pay. The objective of such a structure is to formalize the market, reducing the number of people involved in it, and increasing the level of their commercial specialization.

When promulgated in 2007, the new framework produced violent tensions between the Censors Board and the video entrepreneurs (Akpovi-Esade 2008; Ajeluorou 2009). Some marketers and producers applied for the license, but many did not. As Francis Onwochei, a Nigerian successful director and producer and the member of numerous industry practitioners associations, has emphasized, the new framework “needed the old one to die in order to be able to work” (pers. comm., January 27, 2010). And the fact that not all the industry’s practitioners accepted to enrol for a license progressively compromised the efficacy of the new system. In Onwochei’s words,

Because the new framework is enforced by a government agency, the people that have created it don’t care if it doesn’t work immediately. Its efficacy does not have an impact on them . . . but for the practitioners this is the problem, because if you come in and erase the old system you have to propose something that works immediately, otherwise you make everybody run out of business. (pers. comm., January 27, 2010)

The incompatibility between the formal system proposed by the new framework and the informal one that regulated the industry’s economy since its early days made the two of them become ineffective, practically bringing the Nigerian video economy to a standstill. Within this context, preexisting media formats such as television and cinema came back to the limelight.

Remediation Never Ends: From Small Screen Cinema to Satellite Television and Multiplexes

The two most important protagonists of the media transformations that emerged from the partial failure of the enforcement of NFVCB’s new distribution framework are the South African satellite television company Multichoice and the Nigerian cinema chain Silverbird.

Multichoice is a company that provides digital satellite service all over the African continent, in parts of the Middle East, Greece, Thailand, and China (Teer-Tomaselli et al. 2007: 156). It emerged in 1993 from M-Net, South Africa’s first private television channel. Digital satellite service was launched in 1995 across Africa and Multichoice rapidly became the most popular satellite provider on the market, especially in Anglophone countries. In 2003 it launched a new twenty-four-hour African-content channel, “Africa Magic.” As Moradewun Adejunmobi notes, the line-up of films on this channel “was (and remains) so heavily dominated by Nollywood films that some commentators have suggested that the channel should be called NigeriaMagic” (2011: 70). While numerous industry practitioners complained of the problematic impact that the introduction of the channel had on the industry’s economy, ¹² it is important to underline that Africa Magic had a very influential role in spreading Nollywood’s popularity beyond Nigerian borders. Furthermore it activated the processes of remediation that are today (re)inscribing Nollywood into the television medium, progressively detaching it from its original medium of circulation, the videotape.

Nollywood films started to be screened on television in Nigeria in 1998 by AIT, one of the freshly introduced Nigerian private television channels, and quickly after that they began to appear also on a bunch of other local channels. But all these television channels never paid screening fees. As the president of the Independent Television Producers Association of Nigeria explained to me in a recent interview, movie producers were instead expected to give the channels the right to screen their old films in return of advertising slots to promote their new productions (Holloway, pers. comm., January 21, 2011). ¹³ This bargain economy created an atmosphere of general suspicion between television channels and Nollywood’s producers (Adeleke and Oresegun 1998), making the possible process of remediation of Nollywood into television slower.

Within this context, the introduction of Africa Magic, and more generally of Multichoice and other satellite television providers like Daarsat and HiTV, progressively transformed the media landscape, inaugurating a new season of collaboration between video and television entrepreneurs. The most evident example of this process is the production by M-Net (Multichoice’s sister company) of the soap opera Tinsel, a studio-based multicamera international production inaugurated in September 2008, entirely set in Lagos, and whose cast and crew are entirely Nigerian and have a background in the video industry. The soap opera, which featured many well-known Nollywood stars and directors, proved to be one of the most successful programs ever screened by M-Net on satellite. Its success evidenced the economic viability of television as a distribution channel and participate in orienting numerous Nollywood entrepreneurs toward television production.

While the activity of Multichoice has had a determinant role in the process of progressive remediation of Nollywood into television, the impact of Silverbird is central in what concerns the reintroduction of cinema culture in southern Nigeria, and the emergence of cinema as an alternative to straight-to-video distribution strategies. The first Silverbird multiplex cinema was inaugurated in Lagos in May 2004. It was the first cinema hall to open after the collapse of theater halls in southern Nigeria between the end of 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. When the Silverbird Galleria was inaugurated, not many considered it as a possible turning point for the video industry. The cinema was in fact located in one of the most expensive neighborhood of Lagos, Victoria Island. It had very expensive entry fees (1,500 naira a ticket, almost US$10), it used to program only foreign films, and inevitably addressed elite audiences.

However, the new multiplex had an incontestable success with upper-middle class audiences, and its example pushed other companies to enter the business. In few years, a number of multiplexes opened in the main Nigerian cities (Genesis Deluxe in Lekki-Lagos, Ozone cinema in Yaba-Lagos, Silverbird in Abuja, Genesis Deluxe and HiTV cinema in Port Harcourt). All of them concentrated their program on foreign, and particularly Hollywood, films. This commercial orientation provoked controversial reactions within the video industry’s environment. Producers and marketers accused the new cinema companies to explicitly ignore the local video industry, while cinema owners defended their criteria of selection by underlining that Nigerian videos’ technical standards were not suitable for projection on the wide screen.

Even if it initially took unpleasant tones, this debate progressively produced important results. As Patrick Lee (2011), Ozone Cinema’s general manager, explained to me in a recent interview, facing what they considered as an unpopular accusation (the lack of nationalist solidarity with the local entertainment industry), Silverbird and the other Nigerian cinema companies declared their willingness to screen Nigerian films with required technical standards (Lee, personal communication, February 17, 2011). As a consequence, a number of Nigerian marketers and producers began to invest on higher budget productions in order to access theatrical distribution. Within this context, the theatrical release of the film Through the Glass (2007), directed and produced by the Nigerian star Stephanie Okereke, marked an important turning point. This was in fact the first film, among the Nigerian productions that accessed theatrical distribution in this period, to achieve a real economic success. ¹⁴ Its box-office achievement convinced numerous producers that the return to cinema distribution could be a real solution to the production crisis. As a result, the number of Nigerian high-budget productions augmented, defining the emergence of what has been defined as a “new wave” in Nigerian cinema (Jedlowski, forthcoming). While the emergence of this new wave represents today only a small part of the industry’s production, the transformations that it is introducing might have a long-term effect on the general structure of the video industry. The success of local cinema releases in fact pushed a number of local entrepreneurs to invest in the construction of new cinema infrastructures. Apart from already established companies such as Silverbird, Genesis Deluxe, Ozone, and HiTV (which all have plans of building new halls), there are today a number of other projects oriented toward the reintroduction of both commercial and community cinemas throughout the country. ¹⁵ The remediation of the video industry into cinema format might thus witness an important acceleration in the coming years.

When looking at the reintroduction of theater halls in southern Nigeria, however, it is important to consider that the construction of multiplex cinemas has also introduced new kinds of viewing experiences, cinema-going cultures and audience formations that profoundly differ from those that characterized Nollywood as a small screen cinema. Multiplexes are in fact in most cases located on the top floor of expensive shopping malls. Cinemagoers have to pass through numerous bars, restaurants, supermarkets, and shops of all kinds to access the theater halls. As in many other countries where, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, multiplexes replaced old single-screen cinemas (cf. Acland 2003; Athique and Hill 2010), cinema-going in Nigeria is becoming explicitly connected to a larger set of social and cultural experiences. Going to the movies has transformed into a complex social ritual in which families, young couples, and groups of students experience the world through global consumerism.

Compared to the video clubs where Nollywood is normally consumed, shopping malls and multiplexes express a spatial-temporal gap in the everyday life of Lagosians, a gap between the hardship of everyday urban life in Nigeria and the dream of Lagos as a global city. The films screened in these spaces inhabit this gap, and provide to the audience voices and moving images to populate its imaginaries. The encounter between new screening spaces and the new Nigerian cinema productions that are emerging in the past few years is surrounded by a cosmopolitan aura that gives the audience the feeling of being part of a larger world, something that brings them beyond the limits of their everyday experience and projects them toward an imagined universe of mobile possibilities. However, these cosmopolitan imaginaries are defined and shaped by a complex system of social differentiation and discrimination. Because of their high entry price and their geographic location in the city, multiplexes are accessible only to specific segments of the population. And the films screened in them differ from the mainstream Nollywood productions by incarnating the dreams and fears of an elite middle class rather than those of a large popular audience.

Within this context, the question posed by Jeff Himpele becomes relevant: “How does circulation itself distribute difference by dispersing audiences?” (1996: 48). New media formats and new screening venues generate new audiences, which in return consume these products and frequent these new social spaces to seek a confirmation of their social status. This process marks a relevant transformation within the history of the Nigerian video industry, a transformation perhaps based on the remediation of Nollywood from small screen cinema to other formats.