Auteuring Nollywood: Rethinking the Movie Director and the Idea of Creativity in the Nigerian Film Industry

Abstract

In this chapter, Afolayan deploys a two-pronged argument that provides the basis for an imperative of auteuring Nollywood through the creative energies of the Nollywood directors. The first argument derived from Chukwuma Okoye’s prognostic analysis that Nollywood involves an internal progressive dynamics that would inevitably lead to self-adjustment of its present anomalies. The second argument interjects a postcolonial necessity that requires that the Nollywood movies directors, like the socially engaged literary authors, must assert his/her visions of what Africa must be. The two arguments not only prefigures what has been called neo-Nollywood but also a director-as-author who becomes a critical source of a creative and cinematic rethinking of the African predicament. This is the essence of pressing the auteur theory into new service despite its alleged exhaustion in the West.