Photographer Pieter Hugo’s latest book, Nollywood (Prestel Publishing, 2009), is a photographic exploration of one of the world’s most prolific film industries, Nigeria’s version of Hollywood, a mainly direct-to-DVD movie industry that outputs 1000 to 1500 movies a year (or possibly more, according to some sources). Most movies are shot at low budget on location in Lagos, Enugu, and the capital Abuja, but their viewership has a wide reach, not just all over Africa but as far away as certain communities in the West.
Nollywood opens with a short story, Omar Shariff Comes To Nollywood – A Storyboard In 10 Frames by author Chris Abani, and two essays: “No Going Back”, about the history of the business that is Nollywood, by filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa, and “Nollywood Confidential”, by writer and artist Stacy Hardy – of dis.grace fame – which is a fascinating exploration of her reactions to, and interpretations of, Hugo’s images.
Imagine: The vampire bent over the corpse. Eyes that shine like polished copper. The lips draw back as the mouth opens. The teeth are exposed.
The monster so close you could touch it. I want to look away but I can’t. I’m sucked in; the thrill and of being too close to things, the fear of seeing how close I could get, off seeing what I wasn’t allowed to see. My eyes. Something pushing from the inside out. I look and look. Like the reconditioning finale in A Clockwork Orange, where Alex’s eyes are pried open with metal spiders so that the movies can slip in like ghosts, like vampires.
Part of the discomfort is the politics. Isn’t this stuff meant to be exploitative? I’m thinking of Marx’s famous description of capital: “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Colonial vampire: bloodsucking foreigner draining the lifeblood out of Africa. The monster that won’t die, seducing its victim into erotically charged feeding frenzies of capitalist extraction. It’s victims thus infected, colonised, by the vampiric impulse. The endless cycle.
As a taste you can scroll through all the images on Pieter Hugo’s web site but there’s a certain magic, and a definite tactile experience, in paging through the actual book at your leisure and, of course, the images on screen don’t do the printed versions justice.
The photographs, sitting squarely one per page, are Pieter Hugo’s interpretations and reproductions of Nollywood, rather than a documentation of the industry itself. In Enugu, during 2008 and 2009, he used models and actors to convey one-panel stories, open to interpretation from the viewer – and your imagination does run wild. Most of the images are fantastical in nature, featuring axe-, machete-, or knife-wielding psychopaths, gas masks, blood, vampires, the undead, lots of blood, and demons, intermingled with African and religious iconography, all suitably set in depictions of an urban wasteland. Some are not safe for work; others are probably not suitable for children, even though children feature heavily in a few of the compositions. The photos are daring, gripping, controversial, and challenging, yet it’s very hard to take your eyes off them. Sometimes details in the background add to the effect; other times the starkness of some of the backgrounds makes the actor in focus all that more breathtaking and demanding of your attention. But one thing’s for certain: once you pick up the book, it’s very hard to put it down.
Book details
Photo courtesy PieterHugo.com
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