Nollywood News
Motion Picture and the Nigerian Image
We all know that action speaks louder than word and seeing is believing. And nobody can deny this fact of life.
The history of the film industry in Nigeria did not start with the emergence of Nollywood as the Nigerian movies have been dubbed by the rest of the world and now celebrated as the third largest film industry in the world after American Hollywood and Indian Bollywood.
“The world has continued to marvel at how Nigerians "manufacture" and "fabricate" scores of movies in a week. It is reported that but for India, Nigeria produces more movies in quantitative terms than any other country in the world.”
~~ Tayo Aderinokun, Managing Director, Guaranty Trust Bank
Glover Memorial Hall was the venue of the first film to be shown in Nigeria in August, 1903 and this was done by the ruling colonial office of the British Empire that went on to show primarily educational clips, features and documentary reports of the royal trips to Nigeria and other colonies, English football matches, Westminster Parliamentary debates and other films of little or no value to the culture of Nigeria. And the cinema houses that soon showed up all over the popular cities in Nigeria from Lagos to Ibadan to Kano also showed Western films and later Indian films. But it is important to note that "Sanders of the River" by Edgar Rice Buroughs made in 1935 had some unique parts shot in Nigeria. The film featured the first world class Nigerian actor Orlando Martins (1899 – 1985) and was the first film to put the motion picture image of Nigeria on the map of the world.
Then Nigerian filmmakers such as Mallam Bredan Shehu, Dr. Ola Balogun, Chief.Eddie Ugboma, the late Chief Hubert Ogunde and Francis Oladele produced classic films on celluloid since 1968 and Nigerian films were also competing among the foreign ones in the cinemas until the Indigenization Decree of 1972 transferred the ownership of over 300 cinema houses in the country from their foreign proprietors to Nigerians who did not have the expertise and capital to run them successfully and the economic depression of the late 1980s and the mass importation of Video Cassette Players worsened the situation as cinema houses lost the patronage of cinema goers who now preferred to buy the cheaper pirated films in video cassettes and watch them in the safer and more comfortable privacy of their homes. The popularity of home videos also affected the stage performances of plays by Nigerian playwrights as the numbers of people going to the theatres and town halls to watch live plays began to reduce. As the saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention, the challenges of survival for Nigerian theatre arts practitioners prompted them to dare the production of their plays in home videos. The Yorubas who were always the pioneers of the popular street theatre were also the pioneers of the home movies industry with “Aje Ni Iya Mi” by the late Isola Ogunsola who employed an Ibo man Nnebue of Nek Video Links to produce the video.