Film: Tool for Socio-cultural Integration and Tourism Promotion
By Odimegwu Onwumere
Film, as the word implies, is defined as a thin sheet or strip of flexible
material, such as a cellulose derivative or a thermoplastic resin, coated with
a photosensitive emulsion and used to make photographic negatives or
transparencies. In an online report, rom the Old English filmen in the
Indo-European roots, it is believed among them that one indication of the gulf
between them and their Victorian predecessors is that the
Oxford
English Dictionary fascicle containing the word
film, published
in 1896, does not have the sense "a motion picture." The one hint of
the future to be found among still familiar older senses of the word, such as
"a thin skin or membranous coating" or "an abnormal thin coating
on the cornea," is the sense of
film used in photography,
a sense referring to a coating of material, such as gelatin, that could
substitute for a photographic plate or be used on a plate or
on photographic paper. Thus a word that has been with them since Old
English times took on this new use, first recorded in 1845, which has since
developed and now refers to an art form, a sense first recorded in 1920.
Thereafter, often used in the plural, movies became a sequence of photographs
projected onto a screen with sufficient rapidity as to create the illusion of
motion and continuity.
However, on the theme of
Film as a Tool for Socio-cultural
Integration and Tourism Promotion, it is imperative to say that
Africans, precisely the present day people called Nigerians, didn’t know what
film was
till when in 1903 the first film was shown at Glover Hall, Lagos; and
thereafter in 1904, the first
film titled
Palaver was
shot in Jos, in the present day Plateau State. Before these events took
place, Nigerians were enmeshed in folklores, according to the myths of
their different ethnic groups before they were amalgamated in 1914,
by Sir Lord Luggard. Aftermath of
Palaver, film-showing and
cinema-going was politicized by the British and American exploiters. Through
their makeshift cinema vehicles, they inculcated the much sorted socio-cultural
integration and tourism promotion. This polarization of
film-showing and
film-going was sustained through a platform called
Colonial Film
Unit.
In the recent times, Nigerian films have been produced since the 1960s. It
is on record that the rise of affordable digital filming and editing
technologies has stimulated the country's video film industry. Later in the
1990s, the movie industry in Nigeria tremendously progressed. Today, Nigeria
has the second largest film industry in the world, and rated largest in the
Africa’s movie industry – in terms of the value of the movie industry and the
number of annual film production. In this regard,
film in
Nigeria has brought dividends of eco-political empowerment, socio-cultural
integration and tourism promotion. Nigeria’s
annual film production is
ahead of the United States but behind the Indian film industries. This was
why Hala Gorani and Jeff Koinange, who were formerly of the Cable News
Network (CNN) said, Nigeria has a US$250 million movie industry, churning out
some 200 videos for the home video, market monthly.
In his Keynote Address at the 2
nd National Film Festival, 27
th November,
2003, titled,
In Defence of the Films We Have Made, Odia Ofeimun, a
radical Nigerian poet/author, said that film does represent a deep
psychological implant pressed into place by so many untold and even unspeakable
events in our history. It looks like an underdeveloped prong of the collective
mind of a whole nation. But it is actually the result of a deliberate
scrambling of categories and genre for the sake of effect in a society where
the truth of history is still being told unnecessarily in whispers. Arguably,
in western scholarship, such a fare of screen narratives would be appreciated
as a special category. In literature, critics of African
literature have moved from talking about magical realism, as Latin
Americans pursue it, to what our South African-based critic, Harry Garuba, has
called
animist realism.
In the said 1960s, the Nigerian films were dominated by the people from
Yoruba ethnic group, thereby giving the people of that region an edge to
showcase their culture. And they were manned by Hubert Ogunde, Duro
Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola, Moses Olaiya (Baba Sala), Ola Balogun and
others, whom Ofeimun, described as,
tough-minded denizens of folk drama. These
indigenous Nigerian film pioneers were frustrated by high cost of film
production, but they were never discouraged owing to the cultural ties and
tourism they were integrating Nigerians through their films.
It was as a
result of the unrelenting spirit of these film-dudes that television
broadcasting in Nigeria, which began in 1960s, received much government
support in its early years; and every state had its own broadcasting station by
the mid-1980s.
It was the efforts of these Nigerian film-dudes that the
government law moderated foreign television content to enable the Nigerian film
producers showcase their products. As a result, producers in Lagos began
televising local popular theater productions, which are not far from the films
of the persons mentioned above for Nigeria’s socio-cultural integration and
tourism promotion. Many of that were circulated on video as well, and a small
scale informal video movie trade developed.
In promoting our culture, it is a known truth, said Ofeimun, that rather
than wait on the imports from Hollywood which speak to our common humanity
by denying or simply being indifferent to whatever we could call our own, the
home-video woke up something that was once there but had been stamped underfoot
by managers of the national and sub-regional cultural economy. Not to forget,
this was happening when swindlers in the political marketplace were emplacing
homegrown democracy with one hand and displacing it with the other. The video
arrived in the most homegrown attire that it could weave for itself in a
country where the search for foreign exchange had become the defining factor in
national dream-making. It turned its back on the dollar trail and reached out
for the Naira without hesitation.
Rather than the dollar-mania that had overtaken all comers, it sought an
import-substitution aesthetic which insisted on building a comparative
advantage not as a subaltern of the imported Hollywood stuff but its avid
displacer. Whereas in every other area of economic activity, imports have
killed the local industry, the home-video industry is one area in which the
avalanches of CDs and DVDs that have come as bounties from off-shore
bootlegging confederations have merely widened the room for the video marketers
to dance.
The emergence of film in Nigeria has integrated Nigerian authors to lengthen
the showcasing of their arts through films, as a result, widening the scope of
that genre’s culture which was previously read by those who cared.
Film is widening the cultural relationship and tourism promotion between
Nigeria and other countries since the staging of the first National Film
Festival in 1993. The festival broke the disparity in the West African coast,
relationship with the member states, which were only glued by the awkward
smuggling of goods. Film breached the debasement the international creditors
meted out on us, in the words of Ofeimun, as those who lapped up what others
produced while abandoning their own. Film in Nigeria broke the pariah on cross
border trade which was centred on feeding the stomach and brought about the
exploration and exploitation of indigenous artistic talents. This broken jinx
ended the years of centralised knowledge or awareness: those who could not read
books can now watch films, thereby making the culture of Nigerians go round, as
against the years when it was few Nigerians that could tell which highlife
musicians, authors, or fine artists were doing what within the West coast.
Many academics and intellectuals, especially Onokome Okome, Jonathan Haynes,
Hyginus Ekwuazi, Wole Ogundele, Obodinma Oha, Brian Larkin and Dul Johnson,
made it their business to monitor and censor film, which’s seen by them as art,
business and social ideology – with elements of culture and tourism in any
defined society. It is only film that can tell story in a way that no other
medium can do. Film has integrated the Onitsha Market Literature and
widened the culture of only buying and selling, for the inculcation of
socio-culture awareness. Likewise, the same is applicable in
the Kano Market Literature.
His film,
Amadi, Ola Balogun had to show the cultural affinity
that a people can relate with people from other ethnic group by producing a
movie in such a people’s language. It is on record that
Amadi is
clearly an experimental film: an Igbo film made by a Yoruba. Films such as
Cinaventures’
Bisi - Daughter of the River, Ladi Ladebo’s
pairing with African American Ossie Davis and in
Countdown
at Kusini and his later productions,
Taboo and
Vendor, lack
in the true and original tale of communality of Africans, thereby making us to
grasp the visual results and not in authenticating its Africanness and our
culture. Films like
Dinner with the Devil by Sanya Dosunmu and
Wole Amele and Eddie Ugbomah production, and
The Great Attempt which
were banned by the film censors, perhaps met their waterloos, because they
breached the culture of Nigeria.
Hubert Ogunde’s film,
Aiye, was termed the modal film of
witchcraft, showcasing the Yoruba tradition and their cosmic cultural
endowment, which Ofeimun calls,
cultural economics. Amaka Igwe, Olu
Jacobs and Joke Silva, Zack Orji, Tunde Kelani, Galadima, Liz Benson,
Kenneth Nnebue, Peter Edochie, Sam Loco Efe, Zeb and Chico Ejiro, Mofe
Damijo, Yinka Quadri, Genevieve Nnaji, Jide Kosoko, Omotola Ekehinde,
Zack and Fred Amata, became directors, producers, actors and actresses coming
from different cultural divides. In the words of Ofeimun, they are new denizens
on the block. Their emergence brought about the Nollywood, as it is known
today, widening our culture and promoting tourism.
Nollywood was set by the release of
Living in Bondage critics
called
the box-office movie in 1992 by NEK Video
Links owned by Kenneth Nnebue in the eastern city of Onitsha. The
Promotion of tourism in the story goes that Kenneth Nnebue had an excess
number of imported video cassettes which he then used to shoot the first film.
The huge success of that film set the pace for others to produce other films or
home videos. It is a known fact that through the business instincts and ethnic
links of the Igbo and their dominance of distribution in major cities
across Nigeria, home videos began to reach people across the country. Nollywood
exploded into a booming industry that pushed foreign media off the shelves.
Against the early Yoruba filmmakers who used local languages, the use of
English rather than local languages served to expand the market and fierce
marketing using posters, trailers, and television advertising also played a
role in Nollywood's success, bringing back the British and Americans
Colonial
Film Unit, when films were shown in mobile vans.
However, in Europe, in its
Cross
Border Cooperation: Neighbourhood Programmes under Technical Aid
to the Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS) programme, the European
Union launched its “Wider Europe – New Neighbourhood” initiative in 2003.
The creation of
Neighbourhood
Programmes, covering the period 2004-2006, became the first step in
implementation of the new instrument. The Neighbourhood Programmes as a
bi/trilateral programmes and regional/multilateral cooperation programmes,
involved both sides of the European Union’s external borders. They supported
local and regional authorities and organisations inside and outside the Union
to work together to improve the economic and social conditions of the areas
concerned, to address common challenges, ensuring efficient and secure borders
as well as promoting people-to-people contacts. The initiative seek to address
the challenges posed by proximity and neighbourhood, aimed at working with
neighbouring countries towards improving conditions for the free movement of
goods, services, capital and persons as well as developing a zone of prosperity
and friendly neighbourhood.
“Paving the Way for a New Neighbourhood Instrument”, the Commission adopted
the Communication as part of its new policy, which envisaged the creation
of a new instrument for dealing with the common challenges arising from
proximity related issues on external borders of the enlarged EU. Among the many
examples of projects that were carried out by the
initiative, a
successful project for national and international heritage reservation was the
one entitled,
Arctic Archives and Films under Restoration
in Barents Region (AARE). The project aimed at increasing the
know-how of the Russian partners (from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk) in restoring,
digitising and archiving of the unique audiovisual materials – arctic documentary
films, as well as to facilitate their public access.
Film as a Tool for Socio-cultural Integration and Tourism Promotion,
however, has brought much good to humankind. Film has brought quantitative
studies increasingly dominating analyses of conflict, issues of data validity
which have many a times received tremendous consideration. Our local
cultures are in sojourn all over the world through film. In the interaction of
cultures, globalisation is also setting the pace.
With the approach that local cultures are overwhelmed, it is on record that
there is sufficient evidence, in accord with a comment that 'dynamic cultures
will overcome conservative cultures'. In another vein, reports explicate that
attempts by Nigerian video films to mainstream along the lines of global
commercial culture could explain their superficial commitment to
culture... since the elements of local cultures are daily refined by
influences which dictate the mainstreaming of values to fit global
prescriptions. That, itself, brings into question the optimism of a former
Secretary-General of the United Nations who, in reference to nationhood and
cultural projection, stated
(De Cuellar, 1995: 7): “Nationhood...
has led each people to challenge the frame of reference in which the West's
system of values alone generated rules assumed to be universal and to demand
the right to forge different versions of modernization.” A different view is
the interpretation that 'forging different versions of modernization' means
projecting a version of local culture which suits the demands of global popular
culture.
Gelete: Irin Ajo Eda Laye, says the report, which chronicles facets of a
man's journey through life and was produced by a former television personality
– Jaiye Ojo, is another. The film is said to be a collage of the lives of
different people from different backgrounds: intrigues, desperation, greed,
misfortune, betrayal, and leaves lessons... it portrays Yoruba culture in its
richness, leaving out the kind of abusive and rotten language used in some
other films, ostensibly to raise their popular appeal.
The world cup and other world’s grand finales are today extolled by their
fans through film. The case of the world cup in South Africa is an immense
case study. People, who could not be there live, were united as fans by the
televised world cup films in what many call
Film Centres for Football.
In the
Film Centres for Football, a Christian could shake hand
with a Muslim, irrespective of their religious background, and an American can
sit with an Iraqi and watch football film, irrespective of their countries
wrangling, and so on.
Nigerians can’t thank the
Nigerian Film Corporation, set up in
1979, and the
Nigerian Film Distribution Company enough, for playing
very great-secondary roles in their affirmative consequence towards
emancipating our film. Posterity will always remember foundation and
pioneering work of Nigerian filmmakers like Sanya Dosunmu, Jab Adu, Ola
Balogun and Eddie Ugbomah; Ade Foloyan, Moses Adejumo Olaiya, Herbert Ogunde
and Bankole Bello. As part of its cultural preservation programmes, in 2009,
UNESCO called for greater support for Nollywood, which it said, is the
second-largest employer in Nigeria.
About the Author:
Odimegwu Onwumere, Poet/Author, is a Poets for
Human Rights member, USA., co-founded by Poet Laureate Larry Jaffe, the author
of One Child Sold; and a Champions For Nigeria Resident
Poet, United Kingdom . Onwumere is a voracious reader, prolific writer,
researcher, poet, thinker, social critic, political analyst, an activist, etc.
He has published four books namely: Piquant: Love Poems To Prince Tonye Princewill (2008), The many wrong doings of
Madam do-good (2009),
Through the
Crucible
(2012) and The
Disgrace of Marriage (2012). Tel: +2348032552855
