Speaker: Connor Ryan
Date: Thursday, February 6, 2014
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Place: Room 201 International Center
Connor Ryan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He has studied Yoruba for three years with the generous support of the FLAS scholarship, and recently completed over a year of research on a Fulbright (IIE). In that year he lived in Lagos and explored the relationship between Nollywood and Lagos, or more broadly speaking, between cinema and the city.
About the talk:
This presentation will explore a significant transformation of filmmaking practices underway in Nigeria today, something filmmakers are calling “New Nollywod.” Since the early 1990s, Nigerian films have grown to become perhaps the most widely circulated form of African popular culture today, reaching as far as South Africa, Europe, UK, US, Brazil and the Caribbean. Nollywood has truly transformed the landscape of African cinema by establishing the first industry that is oriented around and sustained solely by a local popular audience. However, much of what we know about Nollywood is set to be upended by a new wave of Nollywood filmmakers who mobilize large budgets to shoot sophisticated films intended for the big screen cinemas. This presentation sketches out some of the implications and contradictions arising from this new form of filmmaking. It asks how these transformations in Nollywood parallel broader transformations in Nigerian urban life, especially in the megacity of Lagos. Finally, it considers the possibility that New Nollywood risks jeopardizing that singular link between a national cinema and its popular audience that makes mainstream Nollywood unique.