African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History by Carmela Garritano (review)

With African Video Movies and Global Desires, Carmela Garritano has established her place among the major interpreters of contemporary African video films, alongside Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Birgit Meyer, John McCall, and others whose groundbreaking work has served to establish a new field of cinema studies and a new approach to African cinema. This is all the more significant in that the subject of her study is what she has defined as a minor cinema in the shadow of a minor cinema, that is, Ghanaian cinema as the junior cousin of Nollywood.

But this is only a frame of reference: the actual subject of her study is the tracking of global South cinema in an age of globalization and neoliberalism. Her work reaches out to the theorizing of South Asian and Latin American film, but is firmly grounded in Ghanaian history, society, and culture. Her personal observations—as in those involving the backgrounds and thoughts of major figures in the industry, key directors like Bob Smith or Socrate Safo, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, and Veronica Quarshie, and many important producers and distributors—mark this study with her astute judgments. Since she experienced part of the period of the effulgent growth of Ghanaian video while living in Ghana, visiting the new mall with its multiplex cinema as well as the small quartier projection sites, and viewing in person the work of the filmmakers, we learn directly of the look and feel of the place, the viewers, and their world. The “culture” of cultural studies is conveyed in its immediacy, while the theorizing about “Culture” is informed by the major writings of James Ferguson, Achille Mbembe, Timothy Mitchell, Sarah Nuttall, Brian Larkin, John and Jean Comaroff, Simon During, and others, and of film studies scholars like Tom Gunning, Moradewun Adejunmobi, and Stephen Heath. Historians and critics of Ghanaian culture and film also abound. Garritano has seemingly read and absorbed them all—Birgit Meyer, Stephanie Newell, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Esi Dogbe, D. J. Smith, and others.

By centering her work in the Ghanaian film industry, Garritano has constructed a portrait of the globalized local centered in Accra and Kumasi, as well as in locations of Ghanaians living abroad. The context shapes our understanding of cinema studies “today”—that is, in terms of what context comes to mean in its local parameters in an age of global cultural flows. What distinguishes this study, however, is not the mobilization of the work of others—thorough and sensible though it is—but the author’s original approaches in reading the cinema and its import. She establishes a baseline of what Ghanaian audiences and filmmakers understand as “professional” cinema—what we might otherwise define as commercial film, mainstream, or Hollywood cinema—in contrast to the variants of the local or minor cinemas in Ghana, often marked by melodramatic or magical indices. Instead of these familiar video film/telenovella genres marking an endpoint for her, they are starting points for more sophisticated elaborations on the directions local filmmakers have taken in pushing the envelope of what is possible, given the constraints of competition with Nollywood. For instance, her analysis of “travel” films, involving Ghanaians traveling to or living abroad, extends the sense of Ferguson’s “coevalness” in a transnational practice—elaborated through her readings of the approaches taken by Socrate Safo and Bob Smith in films set in Ghana and Italy, Amsterdam, or New York, and marked by current conditions of travel and expatriation.

The nature of “travel film” today might be seen not simply in the lives and dependencies of those living in the Ghanaian diaspora in relationship to those at home, but also in relationship to the structures of representation of their cultural singularity. Not only do filmmakers like Smith and Safo construct an image of “abroad”—at times using previously shot footage, at times tricking the viewers...