Nollywood Central by Jade L. Miller (review)

Jade L. Miller's monograph Nollywood Central is an important addition to the body of scholarly work on the most vibrant film industry on the African continent for two reasons. The book is a useful introductory text for students and researchers interested in the foundations of Nollywood as a cultural product in relation to other local and international media. In addition, it manages to clearly outline the trajectory, production practices, internal organisation, legality, and continued spread of Nollywood as an industry, attesting to its informality and disconnection from global media networks. Drawing on a mixture of detailed historical contextualization, critical film analysis, interviews, and insights gained from attending film festivals and related events held in Lagos, Abuja and elsewhere, Miller accounts for the most salient features of Nigeria's film industry, ensuring that Nollywood Central provides an important contribution to African film scholarship.

The first chapter attempts a historical overview of the formation of the industry and the cultural product that is "Nollywood." Miller cites the roles of the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s, the Yoruba travelling theatre and its immediate successors (and technological infrastructure), and video films, as well as the informality of small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs as antecedents to Nollywood. She explores Lagos, the birthplace of Nollywood, as a creative city with its geographical and economic position within broader major cultural industries to conclude that Africa's largest film industry is fragmented and "partially disembedded from the global order . . . with opportunities and challenges" (28). Miller's second chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the production, distribution infrastructure, and mechanisms of Nollywood video films. From scripting to circulating the films both physically and virtually, the author provides vivid descriptions of the industry structure, along with old and new players across the spectrum, while showing the dominant and conflicting forces at play. She claims that the industry imposes on itself a disorganised governance that, in comparison to global media industries, makes the informality and fragmentation of Nollywood both a strength, but also in its tendency to exclude big investment opportunities from abroad, just as frequently a hindrance. The third chapter accounts for the predominant genres, form, and content of Nollywood films and the factors that make them appeal to various audiences in Africa and elsewhere. Examining alternative artistic productions that emerged before and after the video boom, Miller places Nollywood within the context of (post)colonial African cinema in an attempt to uncover its intersections with, and divergences from, various cultural products in Africa.

Though there is not much in the first three chapters that is entirely new to Nollywood studies, Miller's overview of the extant literature and history serves the purpose of bringing together those histories and conversations in a single volume. In doing so, the volume effectively underscores that Nollywood grew out of biting economic circumstances of the 1980s; that its style is a mid-point between television and cinema; that the industry is the result of private efforts of small and medium-scale business owners; and that the audiences experience at once a connectedness and dislocation from Nollywood settings. What is fairly new, however, is Miller's analysis of the regulatory agencies charged with promoting, protecting, and regulating the film industry as well as the (un)successful external efforts to create an organisational and distribution model. The extent to which such agencies have fulfilled their mandates are contentious subjects, which Miller carefully demonstrates. Nollywood players organize themselves through multiple guilds and associations; and it is clear that "government interventions are ultimately unlikely to push the industry forward and more likely to derail it, even if those controlling the industry actually allowed these efforts to be fully implemented" (117). Further, in examining how Nollywood is situated within the global order, Miller carefully plots the paths through which Nollywood's key players and films reach different parts of the world. An examination of external funding possibilities, Nollywood's soft power, formal and informal training regimes, authorised and unauthorised physical distribution are articulated to reveal how "Nollywood's networks run counter to global...