To the movie: Everything good will comeBy Hyginus Ekwuazi
Published: February 19, 2006
Print Literature is not film; film is not literature. Their differing economics and technology, with their equally differing mode and relations of production, ensure that the difference between these two modes of narrativity can never be gossamer. Literature is from Mars; film is from Venus! For we are dealing with two different entities.
Film is not literature. Literature is not film. Literature expresses a purely personal universe. Film does not; and cannot. For it takes some 253 different trades and professions to accomplish the move from script to screen. Critics may single out a predominating signature in any film and go on to assert the auteur theory/principle — but this privileging of one professional in a long chain of trades and professions does not in any way shrink the universe expressed in the film: a universe that is anything but personal; a universe that could not in any way be personal.
Literature is not film; film is not literature. To the very best of my knowledge, no film industry any where in the world has had the likes of: James Joyce, Samuel Becket, Van Gough, etc: writers/artists whose works are ahead of their time. A film is for the here and now: no film maker makes a film for the future: every film has to find its audience immediately. This is in contradistinction with literature — which can afford to wait on the shelf until the right audience/readership is born. Hence the notion of the classic is totally different in both media. Hence, also, in copyright terms, the film comes much quicker into the public domain than does literature.
Finally, film and literature: their potential for social impact... One or two illustrations should be in order here. Slightly over a decade ago, I did the film script for Eddie Ugbomah’ s The Great Attempt. I also did a novel (same title) based on the script and film. Three days after the launch of the film and novel at the National Theatre, the film was banned by the government of General Ibrahim Babangida. But the novel, based on the film and bearing the same title as the film, was totally ignored. Perhaps, more relevant here is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. The moment Francis Oladele set out to make them into a film, all hell broke loose. Security agents insisted that nothing was falling apart in Nigeria and so no one should make a film of that title. The only way out for Oladele was to resort to an innocuous (working) title: Bullfrog in the Sun. All I have been leading to is this: film has a much higher potential (or social impact. The reason is obvious. By its compositional code (the visual image), it appeals to that sense data on which we place the most trust: we see it with our koro koro eyes; and all we need to access it is sight. Literature is scribal - in McLuhan terms, it is cold; and that puts it a world apart from film.
So there are differences, fundamental and far reaching. But literature and film are also similar — if only in the sense that the one, like the other, is a narrative medium. For both media, the narrativity is sourced, inevitably, from the universe of the human mind and the vast dimensions of human life: which is to say, that the nation space becomes (in)directly referential.
Because film, like literature, does recognize that the nation is a continuous project, a project always in the making, both are forever
•Interrogating governance and citizenship/the polity and the dialectics of social contract
•Encoding debates on institutional orders and the apparatus of domination; and
•Scripting social positions for the viewer/reader.
In consequence, literature, like film, can be moved to that end of the social engagement spectrum where it can be used as ‘a medium for dictating the views and prescriptions of the dominant class; legitimising the system and controlling people’s participation in it; shifting the blame for poverty from the oppressive structures to the “self-impoverishing” poor; and anesthetising people so that they participate uncritically in reproducing the apparatus of domination.’
On the other hand, film, like literature, can equally be moved to that other end of the social engagement spectrum where it can be used ‘as part of a social transformation process in which the oppressed express their problems and grievances, deepen their understanding of exploitative social structures, and build confidence, class consciousness and power through organising and struggling against oppression.’
By far the greatest feature which film and literature have in common is narrativity — in all its malleable forms.
The foetal stirring of what has become today the Nigerian film industry must be traced to the frenetic documentary activities of the British Colonial Film Unit, which, at its demise, had succeeded in bequeathing to the Federal and Regional Film Units a strong tradition of the narrative documentary. Inevitably, the pioneer corps of Nigerian film makers (Adamu Halilu, etc) came from this background.
I find it highly conceivable that the industry would have been still born — but for the timely arrival of the independents. The first independent film was made in 1970. I am, of course, referring to Kongi's Harvest, the adaptation of Soyinka’s play of the same title. Other adaptations (Achebe, Abubakar Imam, Ogunde, etc) followed, giving us the classic pattern: a new medium (the feature film) seeking legitimacy/status and exploring its possibilities and limitations in the light of older media/art forms: literature, drama, etc.
And so, the industry grew in Nigeria; and the video film was virtually unknown.
With the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), however, things fell apart and the centre of the industry (the cine film) could no longer hold. For with the abject performance of the Naira in the international marketplace, films, raw stock, etc could no longer come into the country: like a pack of cards, cinema theatres started tumbling into closure. A yawning gap was thus created — which the practitioners of the Yoruba travelling theatre, who had made the transition with the adaptations of their plays, via television to film, rushed to fill with the reversal film. The subsequent movement from the reversal film to the home video was unobtrusive: almost in a kind of natural progression.
But the home video, as I am sure you all know, did not become a commercial proposition till Living in Bondage and Circle of Doom. Pronto, each of these two films was reduced to a formula and recycled ad nuseam. All manners of entrepreneurs and artists, anyone with a nose for quick money, made a bee line for the industry. Welcome, to our own Gold Rush! The consequence? An industry with an inherent capacity to over heat. An industry with a peculiar paradigm of power — as witness the emergence of the marketer-producer(casting)director potentate.
The enduring irony is that the Nigerian home video has spawned an industry that: turns out 1,000 films every year; generates 300,000 jobs every year; and has a turnover of well over N5 billion yearly: with a growth rate in the very high index category, the industry is bursting at the seams. Festivals on the continent, Sithengi, for example, draws their very sustenance from the Nigerian home video. Without the Nigerian home video, there would be no Africa Magic channel on DSTV. Truly, against all expectations, the Nigerian home video has marginalised even the American film at the home entertainment circuit in Nigeria and all over the West Coast and south of the Sahara.
This is an abridged piece of a text of keynote presented by Hyginus Ekwuazi, former Managing Director/CEO, Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) at the International Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors held recently in Kano State.