Art Films

but that is a stereotype in of itself, and the kind of reasoning that is used to defend the crap that Nollywood puts out: the idea that if you make something that is of better quality, that the audience will not "get" it. (or as one producer once put it to me: "our audience is not sophisticated, so why should our movies be?")

apart from being a major cop-out, i think it is a big insult to the Nigerian public and evidence of the lack of respect that many producers have for the audience. i can remember being really pissed off the first time i spoke to a Nollywood producer about improving the sound quality in the movies and was told "why should we bother? these people are going to buy it regardless of whether the sound is good or bad!"


ummm,  actually, they are not.

i used to say that myself; that even though Nollywood movies were not suited to my personal taste, that they would actually be okay if we could just tweak the lighting and the sound.

but that was before i was actually watching them on a regular basis. i watched them once in a while, and i rarely watched them all the way through (i tended to watch only part 1 of 2-part movies). it's only in the past two or three weeks that i started to watch a LOT of Nollywood movies and one thing i realized is that if you watch a lot of them, from beginning to end--especiaally back to back--they're usually really bad, on a lot of MAJOR levels.

i realize that they are entertaining to a great many people, but if most of those people are honest, they'll admit that they approach these movies with their expectations much lowered.

in any case, i don't think bishoptboy is suggesting that making money and making good movies are mutually exclusive. i think he is saying that making FAST money of the kind that drives some Nollywood producers to write, shoot, edit and have a movie on the market within TWO WEEKS--well, yes, that can be seen as hampering the production of quality movies.


i'm really not into judging who is "better" than who, but i definitely don't think that someone who works hard and invests the money, time and energy into making a single good movie is on the same level as someone who produces 20 crappy movies in the same period.

i'm sure you can guess which one i'd favor, though i also understand the reasons for favoring the other.


how many "good" movies do we really make in Nigeria, compared to the bad ones? and i'm not sure what you mean by "except India and the US"--are you suggesting that Hollywood and Bollywood are the only movie industries in the world? that would be a major mistake to assume that!

and what do you mean by "the few movies they make are technically perfect but boring compared to our 'junk'?" what standards are you gauging that by, and which movies are you talking about in particular? movies from Hong Kong are technically perfect but boring? or is it movies from South Korea? or is it Mexico? France? Germany? Russia? Thailand? Argentina? South Africa? WHERE? all of these countries produce technically proficient and highly entertaining movies that even Hollywood envies and scrambles to buy the rights to remake as American movies!

i think you're using a very dishonest style of argument that a lot of Nollywood supporters employ regularly: setting up false alternatives to say that the only alternative to Nollywood's current product is to make "boring" movies. and that argument makes not an IOTA of sense on any level!

statements like this, and this whole exchange between us is essentially meaningless until you can specifically mention the "good" movies that people didn't get that you're talking about.

because to my knowledge, there's not been too many "good" movies out of Nigeria in general!

DING!!!!

now you're speaking my language!

this is the point i am forever to make to people, whether it's about film, music, literature or pottery. on the production level, it is ALL art--the only difference arises on the marketing level: with what intentions is the art being disseminated? is it going to be used primarily for making money, or does it serve some other cultural purpose?

i think the forced dichotomy between "art" and "entertainment" is dangerous, because it sets up a line of thinking in which something can't be "art" if it makes money, or something can't be "entertaining" if it's art,  and that eventually leads to crappier, more cynical, dumb and pornographic "entertainment" and more boring, self-involved, inaccessible, stuck-up-its-own-arse "art"!

yeah, ultimately, it's all about marketing, and even more than that: about the reception of the work. there are plenty of blatantly "commercial" movies that end up not making a dime, and there are movies clearly designed with "artistic" intent that end up getting widely marketed and becoming blockbusters.

in general, i would say that judging the quality of a piece of art solely on how much money it makes is a flawed premise because so much of that is based on luck and not craft, as well as other variants on the marketing level. the fact that the audience ended up not responding to a particular movie doesn't make it a "bad" movie by any means: maybe it wasn't marketed well, maybe there were too many other movies the audience wanted to see at the same time, maybe they just didn't want to watch that particular movie *at that particular time* but they might have responded to it at a different time.

there's way too many factors involved to be able to say "okay, it didn't make money, so it's no good"

  hmmmmmmmmmmmmm interesting am loving it,
Prof keep it coming

  Thanx I think I now understand better and base on our last discussion it not about the art anymore just strictly business right?

also, i should mention that "art films" do make money,  they just tend not to make the kind of megabucks that the Hollywood blockbusters do . . . but of course, they also generally cost considerably less than to produce in the first place.

Don't you have thoughts of your own to add?