A ‘NIGERIANISED’ FILM INDUSTRY? A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF NOLLYWOOD'S PERCEIVED CULTURAL IMPERIALISM ON COLLYWOOD

Abstract

The Nollywood low-budget, fast-paced and lean-script production format for creating narratives has over the years permeated filmmaking cultures in countries across the world. Through this permeation process, Nollywood has influenced national cinemas particularly in Caribbean and Africa countries. In line with this trans-nationalisation and globalisation of the Nollywood cin-ematic model, filmmaking in Cameroon has in various ways, been influenced by the Nigerian film industry; so much so that a number of scholars tend to view Cameroon's home video culture as yet another version or a surrogate of Nollywood. This popular trend among critics has brought to the fore the issue of Nollywood imperialism on Cameroon's film industry, a phenomenon which has remained grossly understudied if not totally outside the purview of studies devoted to Cameroonian film industry. This paper seeks to fill the above men-tioned gap in knowledge. It specifically examines the extent to which the thesis of Nollywood's imperialism on Collywood (Cameroon's home video industry) holds waters. In tandem with this, the present work answers three principal research questions, namely: What is cultural imperialism in the context of cinema trans-nationalisation or globalisation? To what extent has the Nolly-wood home video model exerted an imperialist influence on African local filmmaking cultures? And to what extent is the cultural imperialism theory relevant to explaining the influence of Nollywood on Collywood?.