Old Nollywood Filmmakers: Exploring Different Genres.

Seyi Lasisi delves into the homogeneity of New Nollywood, contrasting it with Old Nollywood's adventurous genre exploration."

Retro Nolly is a weekly series of retrospective reviews of classic Nollywood films by Seyi Lasisi. We will be looking at these films with modern eyes, dissecting what made them unique and how they speak to today’s filmmaking, culture and society.

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When I started writing this weekly retrospective review, the intention wasn't to write any film essay. But, as ideas of this nature, hazy and foggy during conception, tend to do, it opened itself up to eclectic ideas. Thus, for this week, I'm writing a film essay influenced by an idea that has held my attention for a while. With each weekly review I write and each Old Nollywood film I watch, I notice how diverse the genres these pioneering filmmakers explored were. The big and mainstream films made during this period featured a wide range of genres, this afforded the audiences a wide range of options to pick from, thereby diversifying the identity of the then-fledgling Nollywood. 

A sharp contrast to what we see today: Nigerian cinemas and distributors seem to have an affinity for rom-coms and comedy these days. This systemic hurdle stifles the diversification of the film markets and leaves Nigerian cinephiles with very few choices to pick from — and coupled with the non-distribution of indie films that are often more explorative has made the Nollywood very homogenous.

When considering what propelled the widespread experimentation in Old Nollywood, one will take into consideration the urban and contemporary situations and the mode of film distribution at the time. The infiltration of VHS (Video Home System) into the film industry and its monumental adoption by marketers as the go-to model for distribution lowered the barrier of entry and made filmmaking on any scale more accessible, which gave room for these filmmakers to be as experimental as possible. 

“The period when these filmmakers were making VHS films was cheap,” the trailer editor and film journalist, Ebukah Emmanuel Nzeji, told In Nollywood. “With the affordability of cameras, which aligned with how the economy had gone down during the time of Ibrahim Babamosi Babangida, people couldn't travel to do post-production work abroad. This started the era of the home video era.” 

Uche Chika Elumelu opines that the peculiarities of the Videocassette Recorder (VCR) era and marketing pattern encouraged filmmakers to explore different stories and genres. “Mass consumption of movies was key [to] getting your movies into as many homes as possible,” the actress told In Nollywood. “Once marketers were happy, it gave Old Nollywood filmmakers leeway such that they readily explored all the possibilities in film. From Diamond Ring and Karashika to BlackBerry Babes and Beyoncé vs Rihanna, local and global influences were well represented. Instead of worrying about what specific genre would “move” the market, they focused on topical issues and a wild imagination.”

In today’s world, filmmaking is often driven by data. The statistics and data gathered during the theatrical release of commercially successful films are used in deciding the next film to be made.   This data, one could infer, influences the business and casting decision that encourages the repetition of genres and stories; when one genre makes money, everyone wants to repeat the model to make even more money. For Old Nollywood filmmakers, their non-reliance on data metrics and box-office returns allowed them to be spontaneous and more explorative.

Nigerian culture writer, Jerry Chiemeke, opined that it would be disingenuous to posit that Old Nollywood filmmakers weren't keen on making money. What distinguishes them is that, while they were interested in financial gains, the focus was making films that resonated with the audience. 

“Both generations of filmmakers wanted to make money, but the old filmmakers had films that resonated with the audience. The new ones, who aren't studying the audience enough, have a strict filmmaking formula they follow, “ Chiemeke said. 

Babatunde Lawal, a Celebrity reporter, believes that the driving force and point of difference between both generations is the hunger for diversity and experimentation. 

“The Old Nollywood folks were hungry to figure out what worked and dared to tell those stories as they saw them as 'authentic' Nigerian/African stories,” the film critic and filmmaker informed In Nollywood. “However, in sharp contrast, New Nollywood folk are too 'by the book' and formulaic. Some data has shown that romance comedy is the selling genre, so everyone is tilting towards that. They are not about hunger or finding the stories; for them, it's about what has been said to work versus what doesn't.”

The films of recent periods lean more towards family drama and romance comedy, and a glance through the box office records reveals how reliant the industry is on Funke Akindele’s family dramas every December. Nigeria’s top three highest-grossers are Omo Ghetto: The Saga, Battle on Buka Street, and A Tribe Called Judah — aside from being produced by Akindele, they have another point of convergence: They are family dramas featuring Akindele’s idiosyncrasy comedic identity. 

A different argument focuses on the times; today’s economic reality has dwindled expenditure on entertainment, forcing filmmakers to be less experimental and take safe bets with supposedly trusted and tested genres.

“Purchasing power is at the centre of it all,” Elumelu said. “A trip to the cinema used to generally be termed a low-effort date option some ten years ago. Today, to see a movie it's triple what it was then. Nollywood has a major distribution problem on its hands, to lap up the production glut.”

The actress went further to say, “How can all these filmmakers break even, at the very least, with the number of screens we have nationwide? Even streaming platforms aren’t pulling as many subscriptions as they’d hoped. When resources are few and far in between, you can scarcely blame filmmakers for wanting to take the safest bet possible. We are left with the ‘what specific genre moves the market?’ conundrum.”

Elemelu argues that we will witness a renaissance of the old ways with better distribution channels and this is evident with the options of streaming platforms. With the presence of these streamers and the subtle freedom it affords indie and mainstream filmmakers to explore divergent genres, we are witnessing an industry that is relaxing its reliance on some genres. Before their arrival, particular genres, especially comedy, dominated the market. But, we’re seeing big-scale crime dramas with political undertones and epic (period dramas) stories make a comeback with the likes of Gangs of Lagos, The Black Book, Jagun Jagun, Anikulapo, etc. As contemporary filmmakers attempt to discover a viable distribution channel for their films and more indie filmmakers gain monumental mainstream acceptance, the Nigerian film industry will, perhaps, witness an eventual exploration of different and diverse stories.