Nollywood and the idea of the Nigerian cinema

Nollywood films are among the most visible cinematic forms in the world today, just behind India's Bollywood in the sheer quantity of films released. They are also attaining an unprecedented level of technical sophistication. This article appraises Nollywood's current vitality, but in relation to the celluloid-formatted films produced in Nigeria in the 1970s and the 1980s, which, it argues, continue to inform the aesthetic and ethical principles of the globally circulating works. Taking a film, Hostages I & II (1996a), as occupying the middle ground between the two cinematic traditions, the article proposes that the exhaustion of the celluloid films reflected the asynchrony between the discourses of modernization and the national discourses in Nigeria, but that Nollywood represents an open-to-the-world opportunity to advance the discourses.