In demonstrating the taut links between media aesthetics and urbanism in Africa that Nollywood depicts, Ryan offers us three conceptual tools to make sense of the plasticity, undecidability, resilience, and relentless creativity that define Lagos: ambivalence, entanglements, and enclosure. Chapter one focuses on the theme of ambivalence in two celluloid films released in the early 1980s; Moses Olaiya’s Orun Mooru (Heaven is Hot, 1982) and Ade Folayan’s Taxi Driver (1983). Although one might challenge how these films come to represent what we associate with Nollywood, a genre that has always relied on video technology rather celluloid, he uses both texts to argue that “these films incorporate spectacular visuals of the Lagos cityscape transformed by oil wealth into narratives about work that never pays, money that flows from evil deeds, and forms of pleasure so exuberant they kill.” He further notes that these “films denounce the seductive power of oil wealth and society’s integration with global fast capitalism while, at the same time, partaking in this seduction.”[xii] Set in the first decade following a flourishing and dizzying Petro-economy of the 1970s, both films use the boundless hustle and bustle, and the searing resplendence of a dazzling postcolonial architecture of Lagos to comment on a new social and moral architecture in Lagos at the very threshold of an emerging late-capitalist order marked by the abstraction of capital and wealth, and the moral quandary unbridled neoliberalism brought upon and promoted within Lagos as a postcolonial city. So, the crucial assertion Lagos Never Spoils makes is that the city is not just the physical space, but the invisible premises, mindsets, ethos, mundane routines, and regimes of decisions that are made in that urban climate. A similar argument has been made in relation to other forms of expressivity in Africa. In her work examining the environmental matric in Cameroonian verge, Eunice Ngongkim, for example argues that in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon poetry, “the city or town, as the case may be, transcends the mere fact of geography or place to assume metaphorical or symbolic proportions. Its topography, sights and sounds are appropriated as valid metaphors of a poet’s vision of society.”[xiii] Ryan is the first to make this argument in relation to the African city in Nollywood cinema, and perhaps postcolonial African cinema in general.
Chapter two focuses on two television series of the mid-1980, 1990s, and 2000s, Ken Saro Wiwa’s Basi and Company (Oct. 1986 to Oct. 1990) and Amaka Igwe’s Fuji House of Commotion (2001-2013), to further illustrate what Ran sees as the ambivalence of Lagos as an African city. With compelling textual evidence drawn from very savvy interpretations, Ryan uses these two TV series to assert that “urbanism is not, in its final instance, only an essentially spatial phenomenon.”[xiv] Moving away from the idea of the cinematic city to the notion of the television city, Ryan not only details the powerful influence of early Nigerian television drama influences on Nollywood aesthetics, especially the primacy and focalization of the interior space over the vast city streets and its sprawling urban architecture. Proffering the concept of the television city situation, Lagos Never Spoils also demonstrates how this first wave of TV serials in Nigeria, all of which are diegetically situated in Lagos, “produce an urban imaginary without relying on a visually spectacular cinematic mode of rendering urban space and thereby challenge the commonplace notion that the city is out there, in the streets, where everyday life unfolds, not in here, in the parlors, sitting rooms, bedrooms, and barrooms where urbanism is experienced as a set of social relations and city ‘situation.’”[xv] It is the vast congeries of invisible urban social relations across ethnic, religious, gender, and even moral lines that he associates with the urban entanglements that Nollywood documents and testifies to. So, for Connor Ryan, Lagos, like most mega African cities, is not a physical place architecturally designed by city planners and managers, but a social climate, or what Raymond Williams called it, a “lived culture.”[xvi]
In many ways, Nollywood Never Spoils is a brilliant scholarly elaboration of the politicization of culture in the African urban sphere. It expatiates on this argument in chapter three where Ryan focuses on how Nollywood films narrativize social relations defined by particular urban ethos. Focusing on films mostly produced and released in the 19990s such as Kenneth Nnebue’s Died Wretched (1998) Tade Ogidan’s Owo Blow (1996), narratives of what he calls “urban entanglements,” a term Ryan uses to designate inescapable metropolitan social relations that inhere shared consequences. He argues that “this mode of representing Lagos illustrates that urban networks do not simply trace spatial connectivity but rather generate the combinational agency that, more than anything else, animates city life.”[xvii] What the book does with its dazzling analysis in this chapter is to push harder on the poignant argument that Nollywood films, especially in its early years in the 1980s and 90s, in visualizing and commenting on the African city, concentrated less on the physical space and more on social life or what I have termed the politicization of culture and ordinary life. This methodological approach to media interpretation is particularly fascinating because Ryan argues, it “overturns the primacy of spatial thinking about cities and challenges the inclination in film studies to privilege visual representations of space over other elements of city life enregistered in other formal features of film.”[xviii] Radically pushing the boundaries of normative understandings of media interpretation of urban experience, Ryan asserts a counter methodological route that perceives and reads the mediation of African urbanism through a process of “social webbing rather than spatial mapping.”[xix] It is in the social relations forged by characters/people living in African metropolitan spaces and their fallouts, whether genial or disastrous, that we come to understand the essential spirit and mood of the African city, not the spatial reorganizations engineered by city managers that unfold over time.
Nollywood has always been framed as an artisanal culture industry created by despondent urban youth seeking an opportunity to not only tell stories about everyday life, but to eke out a living in an extremely inhospitable social and economic postcolonial environment.[xx] The evidence of its artisanal roots was (and continues to be) the poor quality of films that the industry produced in the first two decades of its founding. Since the 2010s, however, a new genre of Nollywood films has emerged. Better funded with substantial production budgets, directed by professional filmmakers, aesthetically sophisticated, and well-integrated into the international circuits of film distribution, this new genre of Nollywood is referred to as New Nollywood. In chapter four, Connor Ryan brings his proposition about the sociality of contemporary African urbanism in media production to bear on selected New Nollywood films. But here, he asserts that rather than weaving urbanity into the narratives of the films and limiting the visuality of urban space to the interior space, New Nollywood films dare to move outdoors, thus lending “fuller texture and density to screen representations of urban life…”[xxi] The author asserts that this radical changes in portraying urban life in Africa, “has encouraged the generation of new images of Lagos and new modes of envisioning the city.”[xxii] Drawing on patterns relating to the establishment and location new cinema theatres in plush neighborhoods, improved production “values” and the close reading of several films and TV series, that new vision of the African city is one imbued with characters integrated into an urban social milieu marked by what Carmela Garritano has described as “assemblages of desires, bodies, objects, and intensities that presents spectators with pleasurable, affective encounters with new urban consumerism.”[xxiii]
Chapter five of the book deepens this argument, drawing connections between urban romance and the cultivation of an urban mindset enveloped and nurtured by neoliberal practices associated with metropolitan life and work, individual growth, and wider social improvements of society. Focusing specially on romantic comedies, it argues that the genre “largely rehearses the mantra of a neoliberal work ethic, namely, that self-fulfillment is found at work,”[xxiv] but also that “that work does not only produce goods and services; it also produces social subjects.”[xxv] Pivoting back to the theme of ambivalence in the book, but here, through complex processes of segmentation and enclosures, the project of self-making, or subjectivation, as Ryan theorizes it, although innately fuzzy and ambivalent, “it leaves the individual with the agency to pursue a course unintended by power.”[xxvi] Here, one is reminded of the many ways in which popular economies like Nollywood, both through industry practices and visual representations, come to enunciate what Osef Bayart has termed “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” i.e., how ordinary people invade and subvert normative social spaces and established cultural procedures of governmentality designed to exclude them from the pleasure and perks of formality, including neoliberal globalization.[xxvii] What Lagos Never Spoils demonstrates here, therefore, is a very unique mediation of the African city in New Nollywood films in which romance, character formation, neoliberalism, and the wider social transformation needed for collective survival and flourishing are all interconnected through different social, cultural and affective capillaries. What id suggests is that there is a strong link between Lagos, the films about the city, and Nigeria’s video film industry popularly known as Nollywood. The book continues this line of argument in chapter six, but this time focuses on changes within the Nollywood industry itself, rather than just in the film narratives themselves. It identifies the unique aesthetic practices of particular new Nollywood director who produce what he calls ‘‘dark films.’ These crime thrillers, he notes, are not necessarily about “crime, insecurity, or a shadowy underground side of Lagos but instead portrays the ‘old’ objects of bad conscience, such as greed, corruption, violence, and betrayal, as the signs of a new cinematic style and sensibility.” He notes further that in these films, “Lagos becomes the object of attraction rather than the embodiment of anxiety, and in this respect, New Nollywood’s dark and gritty films represent examples of the socialization of alternative affective engagements with city life.”[xxviii] Through a series of new and improved aesthetic practices, the new Nollywood directors Ryan associates with dark films not only draw on the established cinema aesthetics associated with high-end cinephilia in European arts cinema and Hollywood films, but they also reinvent those industry codes and aesthetic practices, combined with a portrayal of both the squalid and sleek aspects of Lagos, to offer a new image of the city that allows these directors to distinguish themselves from the work of other artistes in a city and creative industry where creative saturation makes it difficult to stand out.
