Inside Nollywood: The Audience Split

I’ve watched quite a number of documentaries and interviews on the early days of Nollywood, her development and reasons for her initial success; and one idea that is the same across the board is the idea that Nollywood was originally successful because it was the common man’s cinema. It was something the average Nigerian (or dare I say, African) could relate to.

It presented our troubles, dilemmas, conflicts, desires on screen in the lives of someone else, it was relatable. And one can argue that it’s for this reason that many of the first Nollywood movies had the same themes of ‘family’, ‘search for wealth’, ‘love’, ‘class conflict’, et al.

Over the past couple of years though, the cinema culture in Nollywood has began to grow. People are increasingly more likely to visit the cinema to see a Nigerian movie. However, there is a certain trait that’s in most of our our movies that go to the cinema: they seem more tailored to the refined audience, and I use the term ‘refined’ here very loosely to refer to the middle class and above. The scenarios they depict, for the most part, are mostly not the common man’s problems.

To state it simply, the common man cannot relate to most of our cinema films. For him there is no connection, he does not exactly visit the minister’s office everyday that he’d be worried about  the corrupt secretary (the meeting), he doesn’t exactly fly on a plane to Abuja everyday that seeing it crash in a movie would be much of a bother to him (unless of course it is crashing into his house then that’s a different story), he doesn’t really have a sister in the United States that he’d be worried of her being falsely accused of murdering her husband (Ije). Now of course the underlying motifs apply to a general audience but at first sight, the common man would reach readily towards a Mercy Johnson film than most of our cinema pictures.

The point here is not that the home videos are the boon of Nollywood, neither is it that cinematic films are misleading or going against the so called traditional definition of Nollywood. The fact is, as time goes by changes will come and we’ll have to adapt to these changes. As a response to these changes, the cinematic culture in Nollywood has reemerged. Most tend to think that this means that the home video culture should be eradicated in order to make way for the cinematic films, after all they represent us ‘better’, they are grander, and more professional.

However, the aim here shouldn’t be to do away with the home videos as there will always be an audience for that. With reinventing Nollywood, NR seeks to promote the advancement of our cinema culture whilst creating an atmosphere competitive enough to force the Asaba-movie makers to up their standards of production and story telling without loosing their grassroots touch.

An audience split is not necessarily a negative thing. It enables our cinema to cater for the broad category of individuals that make up our audience. However, the negativity sets in when one is deemed inferior to the other, the negativity sets in when one becomes comfortable in mediocrity. The negativity sets in when we can only point to one aspect of Nollywood as our pride, and the other a shameful unmentionable thing. We should be able to stand on international platforms and proudly present both types of cinemas, present both touches of Nollywood – the ones with overlapping themes, plus the ones that only cater to one type of audience. Whatever the case might be we should be able to cater to both audiences without having huge discrepancies in quality.