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

One of the key defining features of most Ghanaian video movies is that they are embedded—either explicitly or implicitly—in Pentecostal Christian aesthetics. Fittingly, a major research perspective, situated at the juncture of religion and film (and pioneered by Birgit Meyer), elucidates how the movies draw on shared Pentecostal beliefs and practices to mediate themes on occult practices.¹

In African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, Garritano, motivated by her apt identification of the video movies’ “unrestrained and unruly heterogeneity” and their concomitant multiple narrative forms, examines a subject with which scholars have so far not explicitly engaged.² This characteristic of the video movies as a “shifting and historically contingent discursive field marked by myriad ideologies, anxieties, discourses, and desires” enables the author to explore a historical narration of the Ghanaian movie industry through analyses of selected video movies.³ This approach allows the author to show the connection between the economic circumstances that gave rise to the industry and the manifestation of these same conditions within the movies’ themes—centered on poverty, work, and gender—that the first generation of producers explored. Here, the author teases out the ways in which the movies normalize and refashion “dominant discourses of globalization, gender and sexuality, neoliberalism, and consumerism.”⁴ In the same breath, she also emphasizes the manner in which the innumerable number of movies made since the inception of the industry in the 1980s generates a certain ambivalence toward these same themes. The approach also enables the author to explore and elaborate on multiple visual texts and their “variations in aesthetics, narrative form, modes of spectator engagement [as well as] [their] anxieties, desires, subjectivities, and styles.”⁵

This discussion is in the introduction to the book. In this same section, Garritano presents the book’s thematic focus, offers a short historical overview of the initial negative critiques of video movies by African film and literature scholars, and addresses the global aspirations of the industry’s players when she adopts the term Ghallywood. Additionally, the introduction includes a succinct summary of the five chapters that make up the book. The introduction together with the conclusion provide the theoretical lens of contextual criticism that underpins this work and the historical approach that the author adopts to investigate the huge changes that have occurred in the Ghanaian video-movie industry.

In “Mapping the Modern: The Gold Coast Film Unit and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation” (chapter 1), Garritano examines the gamut of the history of filmic practices in late colonial Ghana (Gold Coast) as well as early postcolonial independent Ghana, when the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) was established, until its collapse in the 1980s. Consistent with recent approaches in the social sciences that reject simple binaries, Garritano conceptualizes these two histories as “complex, overlapping disjunctive order[s]” that are characteristic of global media cultural practices.⁶ This fruitful way of framing the GFIC as not a mere supplanting of the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU) enables her to investigate how these units cinematically produced “modernity as articulated in the late modern colonial and the national films.”⁷ Through a close reading of Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, 1952; GCFU) and A Debut for Dede (Tom Reibero, 1992; GFIC), Garritano teases out how these two films, in their treatment of modernity, tradition, and nation, use stereotypical gender differences in articulating their respective perspectives around these themes. In “Work, Women, and Worldly Wealth” (chapter 2), Garritano explores the early history of the Ghanaian video-movie industry from 1987 to 1992. This period witnessed the country’s implementation of a World Bank loan package that required the privatization and liberalization of the nation’s economy and media, respectively. Thus, Garritano shows how Ghana, much as in the cultural-political terrain of Togo during the same period, experienced “a time in which the money [had] dried up, the state [had] pulled back from...