Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: Worst Movie Ever?

There is a certain point where the quality of a movie deteriorates such that the film transitions from good to bad then to so-bad-its-good. Admittedly, I often enjoy watching the few films which transgress the border between bad and “how in the world did this script get funded”. The issue is there is a level of skill needed to achieve that hallowed level of putrid. Directors such as Paul W. S. Anderson (Alien Vs. Predator), Stephen Sommers (GI Joe) and the current reigning monarch Uwe Boll (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, In the Name of the King, etc) have all successfully produced films which are so bad they are actually quite enjoyable – particularly if watching while inebriated.

So, naturally when I came across the poster and trailer for an obviously small budget project by the title of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, I was intrigued – maybe even a little elated at the infinite possibilities of suck. A quick viewing of the trailer only reinforced my suspicions that a new undisputed heavyweight champ of camp may be fast emerging. I mean, how can you not expect a horribly over-the-top movie where a 1500 foot long shark jumps out of the water, bites a flying 747 in half and drags it back into the depths of the ocean to be such a bad movie that it devolves into a comedy?

Imagine my surprise when I watched (most of) the movie and found myself drowning in disappointment. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is bad, there is no question here. It’s so bad that it should have been hilarious. I should have been laughing so hard that my abs would be sore the next day. In reality, it’s just so bad that you’ll want to be environmentally unfriendly and toss the DVD into the microwave and let it run overnight.

First of all, the acting is pretty much on par with – if not worse than – your typical Syfy Channel produced made-for-TV movie of an equally absurd subject, which for a movie of this ilk is to be expected. But even the ponytail sporting awesomeness of a finely clothed, grizzled naval officer portrayed by none other than Captain Camp himself, Lorenzo Lamas, can’t do much to save the dialog, which is more like periods of whispering and shouting thanks to the awesome (insert dripping sarcasm here) microphone work by the crew.

The editing is atrocious – the director used so many random flashes of light throughout his B-roll footage that I almost had a seizure, but what really pushes this movie past the ‘so bad its good’ point is that it’s just boring. I will usually watch any movie from start to finish. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus I had to fast forward in many, many places because once I realized the dialog couldn’t make this film funny all I really wanted to see was cheesy action – like a huge shark jumping out of the San Francisco Bay to chomp the Golden Gate Bridge in half. Moments such as this account for maybe 5 minutes of the 88 minute run time. The rest of the movie is essentially just bad dialog. Really, really bad dialog. Not ‘so bad its funny’ bad either, more along the lines of ‘stop talking before you impede the advancement of the human species’ bad. Like so bad it makes Steven Segal look like an Oscar winner. Like so bad that that David Caruso would groan in agony from watching it. Like so bad…well, you get the idea.

Speaking of which, allow me to address writer / director Jack Perez for a moment. Jack, did you go to school at all? Did it not occur to you that a movie so full of really absurd continuity problems can neither be taken seriously nor be enjoyed for just being an awful movie? I don’t really even know where to begin with this. How about the Mega Shark – a 1500 foot long Mega Shark no less – swimming at 500 knots (that’s 575 mph to the nautically challenged)? A Boeing 747 flies slower, though maybe that’s how the shark was able to bite one right out of the sky. Or how about said Shark moving at 575mph through the ocean while chasing a submarine which is somehow able to outrun it? I’m not a boat guy, but I’m pretty certain there isn’t a single buoyant object on the planet that can move that fast.

My personal favorite was the whole set up for the film – which by the way took abysmally long to establish due to the painful editing. Really, that cute little seven year old Asian girl that did the commercials for Windows 7 could have done a better job putting the sequence together. Anyway, so some classified top secret military sonar experiment in Alaska finds its way to the toe of a large glacier in an apparently uninhabited area (where, of course, the protagonists are in a small submarine studying a nearby pod of whales). The sonar activates and all the whales decide to start ramming into the glacier (because whales apparently do that sort of thing), which causes a huge chunk of ice to cleave into the ocean instantly releasing the Mega Shark from its frozen-for-millions-of-years captivity. Never mind the fact that any animal which might be frozen in a glacier wouldn’t instantly, if at all, come back to life. Never mind the fact that there isn’t a single glacier on earth which is composed of sea water and thus there isn’t a single glacier on earth which would harbor a frozen shark. But how about that our Mega Shark is supposedly 80 some odd million years old, yet the oldest ice on earth is only about 750,000 years old – and it isn’t anywhere near Alaska. Perhaps this is a time traveling Mega Shark? We may never know.

I could literally go on and on here. The stock footage of the Battleships with their guns lowered and pointed straight forward which happen to still be firing; the Naval submarine with “emergency super turbo boosters”; the pilot of the aforementioned submarine getting so nervous about his steering in an underwater canyon that he snaps, pulling a gun on his captain which results in a strangely homoerotic Mexican standoff which is only resolved when our generically forgettable 95 lb heroine TKO’s the instigator with a right hook (though I have to admit this scene was fairly amusing); the giant Octopus tentacle swatting a fighter jet out of the air, etc. I really don’t know if writer / director Jack Perez thought he was being funny, or if he thought this would actually make a good movie or what. All I know is he sucked in doing it, and not in a good way.

All I wanted out of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus was a stupid, campy movie with a horrible plot, cheesy one-liners, bad special effects and unnecessary drama at all the wrong times that I could laugh uncontrollably at. What I got was a stupid, campy movie with a horrible plot, cheesy one-liners, bad special effects and unnecessary drama at all the wrong times that ended up boring me so much that I actually felt like going outside to watch the grass grow, and I’m not being sarcastic whatsoever when I say that. Why, Jack Perez could you not deliver on this simple formula? Why is that so much to ask for?

I really can’t call this the worst movie I’ve ever seen, because that would grant it recognition deserving of jeering and lampooning for years to come. That would grant it legitimacy as a contender among the greats by Uwe Boll and Paul W. S. Anderson. What can be said about Jack Perez and his non-masterpiece of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is that it takes skill to fail, but it takes something much more to fail at failing.

Maybe Wall Street should give him a job.

Spanish Cinema: Calling the Shots

Spanish Cinema: Calling the Shots. Ed. by ROB RIX and ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ-SAONA. (Leeds Iberian Papers). Leeds: Trinity and All Saints. 1999. x 153 pp. 15 [pounds sterling].

This volume gathers very different readings of contemporary Spanish films by Anne White, Maria Jose Gamez Fuentes, Mark Allinson, Santiago Fouz-Hernandez, Paul Julian Smith, Carmen Rabalska, Rob Rix, John Hopewell, and a reflection on production and finance by Cecilie Brown. In spite of the diverse subjects and approaches, most contributors agree that contemporary Spanish cinema has obviously departed from the more or less cryptic criticism of the dictatorial regime to venture into post-modern aesthetics and social mores.

In a highly original essay, White observes in Vacas, by Julio Medem, the equation between artistic creation and paternal procreation, and concludes that the former is paramount in Medem's philosophy of life and of history. This is a refreshing departure from regional concerns which I believe promotes Medem's reception in less constrained circles. Gamez Fuentes sees in Nadie hablara de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (A. Diaz Yanes) a reinscription of the maternal in which the mother serves as link between the oppressive dictatorial past and a no less oppressive contemporary sexism. In comparison to films like Furtivos (Jose Luis Borau, 1975) or La mitad del cielo (Manuel Gutierrez Aragon, 1986), the author finds the mother in Nadie less of a mythical figure than a manifestation of motherhood closer to reality.

Allinson is interested in the different results of adaptation in Pilar Miro's last two films, El perro del hortelano (based on the play by Lope de Vega) and Tu nombre envenena mis suenos (based on Joaquin Leguina's novel). In a contrastive account, he finds in El perro a successful mise en scene of the poetics of glamour that resides in the combination of comedy and fantasy already present in Lope's play. He criticizes Tu nombre, on the other hand, as a failed hybrid of history, politics and film noir attributable to the difficulties of translating Leguina's novel into film. Fouz-Hernandez approaches Bigas Luna's Huevos de oro reading Javier Bardem's body in this film and in his public persona as 'a key signifier of cultural beliefs' (p. 47). In spite of the macho looks and spirit they project, both Bardem's image and that of his character in the film are perishable glitter. To reach this conclusion, Fouz-Hernandez reads Bigas Luna's film as de(con)struction of its main male protagonist.

Smith, following the cultural theories of Michel de Certeau, examines a film concerned with the situation of gypsies in Spain (Alma gitana by Chus Gutierrez) and both the public image and some artistic work of the dancer Joaquin Cortes. While it would be impossibly ambitious to examine the dialectic of gypsies and payos in a short essay, Smith nevertheless raises profound philosophical and moral issues related not only to ethnic diversity in contemporary Spain but also to any multicultural society. He particularly acknowledges the unresolved paradox that characterizes multicultural coexistence: 'respect for other cultures involves the recognition that those cultures may reject the progressive values on which multiculturalism is based' (p. 84). Rabalska, while considering recent tendencies in Spanish cinema, particularly the films of Amenabar, Alex de La Iglesia, and Santiago Segura among others, points to the work of Berlanga, Ferreri and Bunuel as their predecessors. She concentrates, though, on Spanish blockbusters which exploit lo cutre (the sleazy), and tries to explain their popularity in terms of postmodern ambiguity-cum-nostalgia. Once Rabalska has examined numerous instances of gratuituous violence and bad taste, she poses a question that would have been more productively placed at the beginning of her essay: 'Is indulgence in bad taste to be interpreted as an implicit support of mysoginistic representations?' (p. 110). Maybe not, but it still is both indulgence and bad taste.

In the remaining essays, Rix examines the interest displayed by the Spanish film industry in markets, production and artistic collaboration in several Latin American countries that, in his opinion, is only hindered by the pervasive control exercised by Hollywood on audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Hopewell reviews the careers of new directors of shorts, viewing their experimental work as the product of an international education and a set of interests different from the historical and social commitment of previous film-makers. Finally, Brown explains the distance that a ge industry has to go in order to become a fully developed feature film industry.

Continental Confidential! the new Vita of Italian cinema

Who could ever forget the cool of Marcello Mastroianni as he watched Anita Ekberg wade through the Trevi Fountain in the middle of a sweltering Roman night in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960)? The moment, one of the movies most iconic, endures because it perfectly encapsulates the irrepressible sense of life and humanity, tragedy and ecstasy, that has been such a hallmark of Italian film. It has been the medium of many giants, directors such as Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, and the Taviani brothers, and their actors--Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Giulietta Masina, Franco Citti, Monica Vitti, Silvana Mangano, and Sophia Loren. Without them the movies wouldn't be the same. It's a legacy that's influenced filmmakers the world over, and, of course, the place where it all began. But the beauty of emotive clarity lives on in Italian cinema. So who are the keepers of the torch? Here, Interview presents 16 of Italy's current performers, who, with an eye toward their country's rich past, are creating a present and future all their own.

"The atmosphere of Italy and Rome was so beautiful and cinematic," says photographer John Scott, reflecting on his assignment, the results of which are presented here. "The whole tone of the country is romance: the light, the buildings, the colors, the washing hanging out of the windows .... They just really know how to live there." La Dolce Vita, indeed.

RELATED ARTICLE: MONICA BELLUCCI The nerviest Italian bombshell to hit the States since Sophia Loren, Bellucci matches bravura with beauty, and never met a taboo she didn't smash. Rape victim in the recent Irreversible? Badass cybervillain in this month's The Matrix Reloaded (and November's The Matrix Revolutions)? Mary Magdalene in director Mel Gibson's already-controversial The Passion? All in a year's work for Italy's biggest upcoming star.

VALERIO FOGLIA MAMZILLO With one lead, in L'lmbalsamatore (The Embalmer)--one seriously odd movie--this is one beefcake actor (and former model) who's raising eyebrows and pulses.

SILVIO MUCCINO Upstart actor, screenwriter, and part of the hippest Italian filmmaking family since the Rossellinis, Muccino dazzled in big brother (and white-hot-director) Gabriele's youthquakes L'Ultimo Baclo (The Last Kiss, 2001) and Ricordati di Me (Remember Me). What's next? Turning 23.

GIORGIO PASOTTI Think Tom Hanks circa Bachelor Party (1984) and you're somewhere close to Pasotti's appeal. Affable if a little off-kilter, he's the charmer next door, whose roles are delivered with wit, style, and, every so often, a flash of great things to come.

DANIELE LIOTTI Moving between theatrical and television films, this heartthrob has earned a reputation for always laying it on the line. Burning with the heat of Italy's August sun, he steals scenes as often as he does hearts.

DONATELLA FINOCCHIARO In her first--and so far only--film, the modern-day mob tale Angela, this ex-lawyer thrilled audiences at last year's Cannes and Toronto film festivals. Word of her performance spread like wildfire, and raised the bar of what's possible from debut actors everywhere.

ANITA CAPRIOLI This versatile 29-year-old bounced around in bit parts for 10 years before breaking out in 2001--charming in the romantic comedy Santa Maradona and putting a human face on the effects-heavy disaster drama Vajont. With that banner year behind her, she's now taking the leads.

SANDRA CECCARELLI This former fashion illustrator took up serious acting at 28 and quickly rose to the ranks of tried-and-true shape shifters in films like Luce Del Miel Occhi (Light of My Eyes, 2001). She may have come a little late to the party, but at a strong and sexy 36, she's only getting started.

FLAYIO PISTILLI As the star of Paz!, the 2001 film adaptation of the popular Italian comic serial, this gutsy newcomer flirted with disaster by tackling a beloved character with a cult following (not unlike Enid, the disaffected heroine of Ghost World). Paz! was a great big hit, and so was Pistilli. Disaster averted, mettle proven, career launched.

NICOLETTA ROMANOFF Equal parts sass and brass, this 23-year-old descendent of Russia's last czarist family put the spark in 2003's biggest Italian movie to date, Ricordati di Me--her debut--where among a collection of Italy's best and brightest young talent, she stood out as the newcomer to watch.

ANDREA DI STEFANO This 30-year-old has been making noise on both sides of the Atlantic with fearless, textured performances. And choices. Whether it's playing an omnisexual Cuban gigolo and back-stabbing friend in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000) or working with other envelope-pushing filmmakers like Dario Argento, Mike Figgis, and Roberta Torre, he's a step ahead of (and a cut above) the pack of actors who play it safe.

MARTENA STELLA As the dream girl in L'Ultimo Bacio--the generational touchstone of the new Italian cinema--the flirty and flashy Stella, 18, was the personification of youth and romance in a culture that loves nothing more than a bright ray of light and a breath of fresh air.

STEFANIA ROCCA Americans may know her best from 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley (though Greenwich Village coffee drinkers might recall her waiting tables at Caffe Dante), but with over 30 films to her credit and a reputation as the real deal, she's one of Italy's top young performers.

RAOUL BOVA One of the biggest stars of Italian TV movies, he's set to make a splash in the Statesas Diane Lane's paramour in this fall's Under the Tuscan Sun. Lane's carnal touch worked wonders for French heartthrob Olivier Martinez; Bova could be next.

ADRIANO GIANNINI If following in the footsteps of his father, the beloved Giancarlo, wasn't pressure enough, this former cameraman remade his dad's most important role less than two years into his acting career--opposite Madonna, no less. OK, so last year's Swept Away didn't quite work out, but it did prove that Adriano Giannini is working on the right side of the camera.

STEFANIA RIVI She went from playing the Virgin Mary (in her debut) to a bisexual named Betta in three films flat. Now that's what we call range.

JOANNA JACOVINI As Interview's Fashion Director, Joanna Jacovini traveled to Rome to ensure the Italian cinema subjects looked their best for photographer John Scott. And while the six-day shoot went swimmingly, Jacovini did have a run-in with the law. "We tried to sneak into the Trevi Fountain," she says, "but the police came and told us to leave. We didn't get the shot, but we certainly tried."

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-XIV

For soyayya authors there is a didactic and moral purpose to their discourse on love that gives their novels a sense of social responsibility. They argue that incompatibility in the choice of marriage partner leads daughters to run away from their parents to become 'independent women' (and hence prostitutes), or to attempt suicide, or to go through an unhappy marriage and an early divorce - even if the partner chosen is wealthy. But as the author 'Dan Azumi Baba argues, 'now everything has changed [and] because of reading such books [soyayya books] no girl agrees with forced marriage and parents understand that if they force their daughter to marry somebody she will eventually go and become a prostitute' (interview, 28 June 1995). He continued, 'the main problem of marriage is lack of love', adding that most women now are wise to the fact that 'if there is love, they will not mind about any problems'. The concerns aired by 'Dan Azumi and others over the increasing commodification of contemporary love and the iniquities of forced marriage are not just the province of soyayya books but have formed staple themes of Indian films. For over thirty years Indian films have provided an extended narration of the problems of arranged marriages and of the place of materialism in a 'traditional' society that mimics real events in everyday Hausa lives. Before discussing soyayya books themselves it is worth returning briefly to the concept of fantasy and imagination to give an example of the investment of viewers in Indian narratives.

The possibility of imaginative investment was brought home to me one day when I was talking to an older Hausa friend in his 40s. Knowing he liked Indian films, I was surprised to hear him say that they had a negative influence on Hausa culture. He cited the example of his own marriage. He said that when he was young, in the 1970s, he went to see lots of Indian films. He, like many other men, liked the commitment of Indian films to the family, the importance of marriage and children, and many other cultural values in the films. The problem, he said, was that in Indian films women are very supportive of their husbands. He explained that what he meant was that when an Indian man sees his love they talk about their problems. He declares his love for her, she declares hers for him, and they embrace. In the 1970s men who went to the cinema were expecting or wanting similar behaviour from their wives. It was what he had wanted when he got married. But when he returned home and tried to talk to his wife she would turn away, answer as briefly as possible and try to leave the room. He told me women in Hausa society were taught that their husband is everything and they should be in awe of him. His wife was acting with the modesty that a good Hausa wife should have, whereas he wanted the sort of relationship he had seen in Indian films. As a result he had encountered many problems early in his marriage and that was why, he argued, the films could be harmful. Indian films, he said conveyed ideas about marriage and relationships that local culture could not support.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-XIII

Soyayya books first emerged from Kano, the metropolitan centre of northern Nigeria. Originally authors came together to organise writers' clubs modelled on the famous drama clubs organised by heroes of independence in the north, Mallam Aminu Kano, Sa'adu Zungur and Maitama Sule. The first and most famous clubs were Raina Kama ('Deceptive Appearances')(19) and Kukan Kurciya ('The Cry of a Dove'), created in order to exchange mutual aid and advice among neophyte authors. Since that time new writers' clubs have appeared in many major cities and contemporary soyayya authors come from all northern urban centres. Many authors began by basing their first novel on an experience that had happened to them or their friends, often an affair of love. In da so da K'auna I, II (meaning 'Where there's love and desire') by Ado Ahmad (1989) or Garnak'ak'i I, II by Adamu Mohammed (1991) are both examples of this. Many authors go on to write about other issues, whether it be politics in Bala Anas Babinlata's Tsuntsu Mai Wayo I, II ('The Clever Bird', 1993) or 'yan daba [thugs] and crime in 'Dan Azumi Baba's Rikicin Duniya I, II, III ('This Deceptive World', 1990). The dominant theme with which most books are identified remains the conflict over love.

Soyayya books dramatise the problems of contemporary sexual relations, criticising forced marriages and the increasing material demands of both lovers and parents. Many authors claim a didactic purpose for their writing, arguing that they are educating young people and their parents against the problems that beset contemporary youth. The fact that many authors begin writing as a direct result of a personal experience underscores the close relation between the stories and perceived social problems. Adamu Mohammed explained to me that he began writing books when the parents of the girl he loved married her off, against the wishes of both the lovers, to a wealthier man. As a poor man, Mohammed argued, he had no means of fighting the decision except by writing his book Garnak'ak'i - 'Uncompromising'. The sense of outrage and vindication is common to many of the early soyayya writers. A similar event sparked off the career of Ado Ahmad. As Maigari Armed Bichi (1992) reports, the arrangements for Ahmad's first marriage were broken off despite the fact that he and his fiancee were in love and her parents were happy about the marriage: 'a misunderstanding between their two families . . . was caused by the grandmother of the girl, who. . . had arranged for the girl to be given to one Alhaji(20) for marriage' (1992: 7). Bichi continues that as a result Ahmad intended his first novel to 'show how love is played in Hausa society and the role of parents in marriage affairs' (ibid.). One fledgling author from Kaduna, Adamu Ciroma, who also began writing after a personal experience, argues that many if not most soyayya authors begin writing this way:

Our writers today we share experiences which makes us start writing . . . . An experience happens to me and so I decide to write about it in order to enlighten people on what has happened . . . .Nine out of ten writers begin writing soyayya because they have experienced it.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-XII

MARKET LITERATURE IN THE VERNACULAR: THE RISE OF SOYAYYA BOOKS

In the last six years there has been a near-revolution in the publishing of Hausa literature. A whole new genre of littatafan soyayya, love stories, has emerged, published by authors themselves and sold through markets and small shops all over the northern region. During the time of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), when the cost of imported goods (such as paper) has been soaring and the purchasing power of incomes has been collapsing, soyayya authors have published over 200 books, and created a system of publishing and distribution that keeps book prices within the range of ordinary people. Earlier books have achieved the status of 'best-seller', giving their authors a great deal of fame. Many of them are read out on the radio, on the extremely popular programme Shafa Labari Shuni (meaning 'a person exaggerates what he hears'), and adaptations of successful books form a significant proportion of the vibrant new market in Hausa videos. While the debate rages over whether soyayya books are a beneficial addition to Hausa culture, their great achievement has been to create a popular Hausa reading public for fiction.

In his major survey of Hausa literature Furniss (1996: 54-5) argues that soyayya writers 'appear to owe more to the English language publishing of Mills and Boon, and James Hadley Chase. . . than to any Hausa precedent'. Furniss is correct in assessing the innovativeness of this new style of literature but mistaken in seeing it as based solely on Western precedents. Soyayya authors and their critics cite many sources for their books, including English romances and Hollywood 'best-sellers', but they also admit the important influence of Arabian tales, Nigerian romance magazines and Indian films. I concentrate on the influence of Indian films, not to ignore these other media, but as part of my larger point in analysing the flow of media within and between non-Western countries. The great appeal of Indian films across class, education and gender, along with the recognised similarities in culture, make them a significant precedent for contemporary writers and readers.

Soyayya books are pamphlets tittle more than fifty pages in length. Many run to two or three parts in order to keep costs down. They are badly typeset, badly printed and, from the point of view of critics, badly edited and written. Furniss argues that authors adopted the practice of publishing their own work, using offset litho printers, following the example of religious ajami(18) poets. Print runs are typically small, running from 2,000 to 5,000, but successful books will go into multiple printings. Originally, soyayya books were sold from shops and vendors selling school books. As they have become more established it is not uncommon to see market stalls devoted solely to soyayya books, or to see hawkers wandering round markets and business districts balancing books on their heads. The authors, unlike earlier generations of Hausa writers, come from neither an elite nor even a well educated background. Some have never received Western education and most of those who have, left after primary level, remaining only in Islamic schools, and consequently their knowledge of English, and with it their integration into existing literary culture, is often poor. Women make up a significant proportion of soyayya authors and some, like Hajiya Balaraba Ramat Yakubu (Alhaki Kwikwiyo, meaning 'Retribution is like a puppy, it follows its owner', 1990a, and Budurwar Zuciya, 'The heart's desire', 1990b), are among the most famous soyayya authors. Secondary-school leavers make up a significant proportion of the readers (though perhaps not as great a proportion as people claim) and there is a strong association in the public mind between soyayya books and women readers. Despite this, many young men I knew were avid readers of the literature, and the high percentage of men who write fan letters to the authors suggests that there is a significant male relationship.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-XI

Thus, men and women live in two separate worlds, normally do not share their thoughts or their lives, and function fairly independently of each other in their different spheres. Even husbands and wives do not normally socialize together or with each other; in order to show respect in the home, they do not eat together, seldom interact and avoid addressing each other by name. [Callaway, 1987: 44]

As a result of this sexual segregation, Callaway argues, 'The experience of romantic love is not normally part of an Islamic marriage'; '"Love" and "Romance" are Western concepts and have little real meaning in this [Hausa] culture' (1987: 36, 40). Callaway's comments caricature and devalue the complex emotions of Muslim marriages,(15) but she does represent problems that many Hausa experience. Many soyayya authors discussed the issue with me as they talked of the massive changes in the way young men and women interact with each other in contemporary Hausa society. Ideally, both women and men in Hausa society are expected to exhibit kunya, a sense of modesty and shame. Adamu Mohammed,(16) author of the novel Garnak'ak'i ('Uncompromising') explained what this meant in terms of sexual interaction. Traditionally, he said, all meetings between boys and girls would be chaperoned by older relatives. Frequently the couple involved might be too embarrassed even to speak to each other, and women, especially, would communicate reluctantly, if at all. Another author, 'Dan Azumi 'Yan Gurasa,(17) confirmed this. 'When I was young,' he said, 'and came across the girl I loved I couldn't face her and tell her. Instead I would send someone who could talk to her about it.' Nowadays, both authors agreed, this sense of shyness has been transformed, and both men and women act in a manner that would have been unacceptable twenty years previously.

In their plots, soyayya authors examine some of the issues made contentious by the shift in gender interaction. The common narrative conflict between youth wishing to marry for love and parents who wish to organise marriage partners reveals how romance narratives allow a form of moral enquiry for Hausa youth. The fantasy encoded in fictional narratives succeeds, as Beidelman points out, 'by presenting a version of experience and things that is both less and more than what we ordinarily encounter', allowing, in part, 'a luxuriation of qualities and possibilities not encountered in reality' (1993: 5). For over thirty years Indian films provided a dominant forum for the creation of an imaginary space where real social tensions over love and responsibility, individual desire and social control, appeared and various resolutions of these tensions were considered. Indian films could do this successfully only by engaging with issues that were meaningful to Hausa viewers yet at the same time providing enough of a difference for alternative resolutions to be possible. This engagement with the conflict of love and courtship in contemporary society is what has defined the plots of soyayya books for both their admirers and their critics. Examining these stories reveals the intertextual presence of Indian films and its appropriation within Hausa popular culture

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-X

The collapse in the Nigerian economy has made the cost of the lefe, the gifts each man must give his wife before marriage, economically difficult for many young men. The lefe forms only part of the rising cost of marriage, and this inflation has been vehemently attacked as one of the most visible markers of the growing materialism of Hausa society. Religious leaders have complained regularly against the practice and there have even been attempts by state governments to regulate the costs involved, but to little avail. The result is that young men are delaying marriage until a later age when they have the income to afford the expense. Meanwhile the marrying age of women has also been moving upward. The introduction of compulsory primary-school education in 1976 affected the traditional practice of arranging marriages for girls before the onset of puberty, at around 13 years of age (Callaway, 1987). Nowadays it is more common for parents to wait until a child has finished school, around the age of 16 or 17, before choosing a marriage partner. Callaway, in her study of Hausa women in Kano, sees the rise in both Western and Islamic education as the source of potential change in the status of women (ibid.). As women are more enlightened as to their rights as women under Islamic law, she asserts there may be more room to resist Hausa cultural practices from the point of view of Islamic orthodoxy. One consequence is that increased education and the rise in marriage age mean that women may be more prepared to assert some measure of control over the choice of their marriage partners.

For parents and religious leaders the increase in the number of sexually mature young people outside the bounds of marriage is not only contrary to a proper Islamic social order but has become an issue demanding public regulation. In 1987 the Kano state government set up state committees to find solutions to contemporary social problems. Along with the rise in crime, hooliganism and begging, the 'problem' of unmarried women was the subject of state examination. Two years later, in his Ramadan sermon, Sheikh Isa Waziri, one of the prominent Islamic leaders in Kano, addressed the same issue when he sent out a call for rich men to marry more wives in order to solve what he termed the 'calamity' of unmarried women (Barkindo, 1993: 96). A perceived rise in sexual activity before marriage, as well as in the growing number of prostitutes (seen as a moral rather than an economic problem), has neatly conflated the issues of westernisation, materialism, the need to regulate sexuality, and the immorality of the secular Nigerian state, for northern political and religious leaders.

In her discussion of Hausa female marriage and sexuality Callaway points out that there is no acceptable space within Islamic society to be of childbearing age and unmarried. As more women occupy this 'unacceptable' space, relations between the sexes are evolving. Callaway, for instance, describes traditional Hausa interaction between the sexes as extremely limited. Compared with the West, she argues, Hausa men live separate physical and emotional lives. She concludes,

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-IX

What Jackson and Beidelman see as a function of oral literature Kakar views as part of the collective fantasy provided by the mass culture of Indian films. I argue that the engagement with themes of romantic love revealed in soyayya books and Indian films exemplifies precisely this desire to explore the limits of social norms during a period of rapid change. The tension between arranged marriages and love marriages is not new to Hausa society, nor is the idea that romantic love may be subversive of the moral order, as many Hausa folk tales exemplify. What is new, however, is the speed of contemporary social change that has placed the issues of love, marriage and sexuality squarely at the forefront of social concern. The increase in conflicts over the style and nature of courtship, the appropriate age and conditions of marriage and over what is seen as the increased materialism of marriage partners condenses fears about the pace of social change. As Indian films and soyayya books are the main mass cultural forms that provide a sustained engagement with these issues over a long period of time, it is unsurprising that they have become a topic of public controversy. To account for the intensity of this controversy it is first necessary to outline the boundaries of social transformation in contemporary Hausa society.

YOUTH AND MARRIAGE IN CONTEMPORARY KANO

The oil boom of the 1970s thrust Nigeria into the fast capitalism of an oil economy, transforming not only the economic basis of the country but the pace of urbanisation, consumption habits and the political system. Watts and Pred (1992) have borrowed from Benjamin to label this revolutionary change the 'shock of modernity'. As well as making the country dependent upon imports of basic foodstuffs, the boom internationalised the consumption habits of the middle classes, creating the easy assumption that fast capitalism meant fast westernisation. The economic crash which followed the oil boom exacerbated these transformations and contributed to a growing self-consciousness about the changing nature of Nigerian society, marked by Islamic revitalisation and criticism of secular westernisation. The transformative impact of the boom and bust of the oil economy continues to affect all classes of Nigerian society, but the position of youth has become an issue of considerable concern (Barkindo, 1993; 'Dan Asabe, n.d.; Said and Last, 1991).

The 'problems' of contemporary youth are evidenced in different realms, from the perceived rise in violence to theft, drug-taking, disrespect for elders and materialism. Even the rise in Islamic participation of youth has been a key moral discourse by which youths have challenged the authority of government and elders.(14) Important religious scholars such as Sheikh Isa Waziri in Kano preached regularly against the changing attitudes and behaviour of Hausa youth, and it is these social tensions that are indexed by the debate about soyayya books. At the forefront of this concern is the problem of changing marriage patterns in northern Nigeria, and more especially the concern over regulating female sexuality.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-VIII

The reasons why Hausa viewers recognise commonalities between their culture and Indian culture are many and varied. In an Islamic African society the films are popular because they engage with the disjunctures of social change elaborated in terms that are familiar to Hausa society yet also distinct from it. This coexistence between likeness and dissimilarity is important because it is in the gap that the narratives of Indian film allow the exploration of social relations. I now discuss in greater detail this aspect of narrative and offer suggestions why it has become so controversial in soyayya books.

IMAGINATION, NARRATIVE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

The narratives of Indian films allow the exploration of attitudes and social possibilities that are still controversial in everyday Hausa social life. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar has discussed this phenomenon in India, arguing that Hindi films are successful because they engage everyday fantasy. 'The power of fantasy . . . .' he argues, 'comes to our rescue by extending or withdrawing the desires beyond what is possible or reasonable' in the social order (1989: 27). He defines fantasy as 'that world of imagination which is fuelled by desire and which provides us with an alternative world where we can continue with our longstanding quarrel with reality' (ibid.). My concern in this article is with the narrative tension between love marriages and arranged marriages which is a dominant theme of both Hindi cinema and Hausa soyayya books. There is much more to Hindi films than this - the spectacle of beauty and wealth, the difficulty of reconciling responsibility to kin in a rapidly urbanising bureaucratic world or the problem of operating with honesty and honour in a corrupt postcolonial world - but this one genre of Indian film gives insight into broader conflict between desire and responsibility to a wider social order.

The romantic insistence on the potentially subversive power of imagination has been explored in two recent works on African oral literature and social structure. Beidelman (1993) argues that imagination has both an individual and a group importance. On the one hand, 'it relates to the ways that people construct images of the world in which they live. . . a cosmology that. . . presents a picture in which they measure, assess and reflect upon the reality of their experiences' (1993: 1). On the other hand, imagination offers a space from which to reflect upon the social order: 'In this sense imaginative exercise constitutes means for criticism, for distortion, even subversion of the moral social order' (ibid.). Michael Jackson, in his study of Kuranko oral literature, puts forward a similar picture of the power of narrative to explore ambiguities in social life. 'Kuranko narratives,' he argues, 'initiate a dialectic of doubt and uncertainty . . . [that] promote ambivalence and exploit ambiguity as a way of stimulating listeners to resolve problems of choice' (Jackson, 1982: 2). Jackson stipulates that narratives are a secure way to bring up ambiguous situations, allowing readers the imaginative space to explore multiple resolutions of narrative tensions, before resolving them (in the case of oral literature) safely within the limits of accepted norms.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-VII

The basic principles of commercial cinema derive from the needs of Indians caught in the hinges of social change who are trying to understand their predicament in terms familiar to them. [Nandy, 1995: 205]

Nandy argues that commercial cinema tends to

reaffirm the values that are being increasingly marginalized in public life by the language of the modernizing middle classes, values such as community ties, primacy of maternity over conjugality, priority of the mythic over the historical. [ibid.: 202] ` Characters in Indian films have to negotiate the tension between traditional life and modernity in ways that Hausa, in a similar postcolonial situation, can sympathise with. The choice of wearing Indian or Western-style clothes; the use of English by arrogant upper-class characters or by imperious bureaucrats; even the endemic corruption of the postcolonial state, are all familiar situations with which Hausa viewers can engage.

The familiarity that Hausa viewers experience when watching Indian films is reinforced by changes over time in the style and themes of Indian film. Contemporary films are more sexually explicit and violent, and borrow heavily from the styles of Western film genres. Nigerian viewers comment on this when they compare older Indian films of the 1950s and 1960s that 'had culture' with newer ones which are more westernised. Older films were more often set among the rural poor than contemporary films. Characters, for instance, were more likely to wear traditional clothes, to keep animals or to travel by oxen. Not only did visual iconography change but musical styles, once based mainly on Indian classical forms, began to incorporate disco beats and Western instrumentation. This perceived shift toward a growing materialism in Indian film echoed a similar shift in Nigerian society brought about by the radical dislocations of the oil boom of the mid-1970s. For Nigerian audiences the evolution of Indian film style thus corresponded with developments within their own society that brought home the similarities between the two. This has been a contentious process, and as difficult for Hausa viewers to accept in Indian films as to accept in their own culture. One young friend, who was a fan of Indian film, complained to me about this shift:

When I was young and watching films, the Indian films we used to see were based on their tradition. You wouldn't see something like disco, going out to clubs, making gangs. Before, they didn't do it like that. But now Indian films are just like American films. They go to discos, make gangs, go out for picnics.(13) They'll do anything in a hotel and they play rough in romantic scenes where before you could never see things like that.

The perceived rise in violence, in sexual immorality and in materialism are all represented in my friend's complaint. Clubs, hotels and discos are symbols in Indian film and in Hausa popular culture of corrupt immoral spaces frequented by the rich. They are emblems of Western life and stand in moral contrast to the Indian or Hausa social spaces such as the temple, mosque or village. Indian films depict an ambivalent attitude to such spaces, exploiting their use as spectacle while at the same time ensuring that the heroes and heroines are at some moral distance from them. Nandy argues that Indian films stand against the vicissitudes of the postcolonial state by grounding the shifts in materialism, urbanisation and apparent westernisation within a moral universe that is structured around familiar religious values. This is why, despite apparent westernisation, Indian films depict moral dilemmas strikingly different from Hollywood or other Western films.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-VI

Despite the cultural gap between the Hindu Indian audience to which the filmic text is being addressed and the Muslim Hausa one watching in northern Nigeria, what is remarkable is how well the main messages of the films are communicated. This problem is made easier by the narrative structure of Indian films, which is borrowed from the Indian religious epics the Mahabarata and Ramayana (Mishray, 1985). The dependence upon the epics means that there is usually a fixed range of plots with clear moral contrasts that make the outlines of Indian films familiar to their viewers. The regularity of character types whose actions fall within a limited range of behaviour such as the hero, the mother, the comedic friend or the evil boss, with many of the lesser roles (such as boss or the mother) played by the same people in film after film, further aids the fixed parameters of plot structure within which the spectacle unfolds. This dependence on religious epics for narrative structure provides an easily comprehended moral guide for characters' actions and creates a limited set of narrative possibilities facilitating the easy 'translation' of Indian films across cultural, linguistic and national boundaries.(12)

Talking to many friends about their love of Indian films, I was struck by the common refrain that Indian culture was 'just like' Hausa culture. I found it surprising that staunchly Muslim Hausa should identify so strongly with Hindu Indian culture, but over time different cultural similarities became clearer. Most obvious are the many visual affinities between Indian and Hausa culture. Men in Indian films, for instance, often dress in long kaftans, similar to the Hausa dogon riga, over which they wear long waistcoats, much like the Hausa palmaran. Women are also dressed in long sails and scarves which veil their heads and accord with Hausa ideas of feminine decorum. The iconography of Indian 'tradition', such as marriage celebrations, food, village life and so on, even when different from Hausa culture, provides a similar cultural background that is frequently in opposition to the spread of 'westernisation'. Indian films place family and kinship at the centre of narrative tension as a key stimulus for characters' motivations to a degree that rarely occurs in Western films. They are based on a strict division between the sexes, and love songs and sexual relations, while sensuous, are kept within firm boundaries. Kissing is rare and nudity absent. These generic conventions provide a marked difference from Hollywood films, and many Hausa viewers argue that Indian films 'have culture' in a way that American films seem to lack.

More complexly, Indian films are based upon negotiating the tension of preserving traditional moral values in a time of profound change. Ashis Nandy argues, in terms as relevant for Nigerians as they are for Indians, that Indian films are successful with Indian masses because despite their spectacle and rich settings they are based in a moral universe of action that is grounded in a traditional world view.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-V

The lack of information on the political economy of Indian film obscures the relation between the economic and symbolic reasons for its popularity (but see Pendakur and Subramanyam 1996). It seems likely that the disappearing presence of American films is related to the increasing cost of American film prints, which makes the cheaper Indian films more attractive. However, Hausa, Lebanese and Indian film and video entrepreneurs I interviewed all accounted for the dominance of Indian film in symbolic and cultural, rather than economic, terms. In an interview with Michel Issa, manager of the Cinema Distribution Circuit, which owns cinemas throughout northern Nigeria, Issa argued that Indian films were popular because 'their culture is the same' as Hausa culture.(10) One Indian video entrepreneur posited that it was the (allegedly) common linguistic roots of Hindi and Hausa that accounted for the sense of cultural familiarity (an argument supported by Muhammad 1992). (11) Uninterested in my questions about why Indian films were more popular, Issa finally said he had no idea why Arab films had not been accepted. All he knew was that from the beginning Indian films gained a massive popular following in the north. Even before American films stopped being distributed in Nigeria, he pointed out, they had been largely replaced by Indian films on northern screens.

Indian film fans and theorists refer to contemporary Hindi films as masala films. Referring to the blend of spices used in Indian cooking, popular Indian cinema often mixes the genres of romance, melodrama, action, musical and comedy within the same film. For a considerable time this eclectic mix was seen by both Western and Indian academics as evidence of the inability of Indian film makers to make 'proper' American-style films. More recently, Indian film scholars have come to view Bombay films not as poor imitations of American films but as based on a distinct narrative style and structure (see Chakravarty, 1993; the special issue of India International Centre Quarterly 1980; Mishray, 1985; Thomas, 1985, 1995). Rosie Thomas argues that:

A form has developed in which narrative is comparatively loose and fragmented, realism irrelevant, psychological characterization disregarded, elaborate dialogues prized, music essential and both the emotional involvement of the audience and the pleasures of sheer spectacle privileged throughout the three hour long duration of the entertainment. [Thomas, 1995: 162; see also Thomas, 1985]

Indian films, or at least the Hindi ones that are imported into Nigeria, are made for a pan-Indian audience, and the makers of the films are aware of the necessity of constructing a filmic style that crosses both linguistic and cultural boundaries. Even so, these films are embedded in a cultural specificity that presupposes familiarity with Indian cultural values, Hindu religion, and a strong sense of Indian nationalism. They are also playfully intertextual, making constant reference to classical Indian mythology, folk drama and literature and Hindu religious practice. Chakravarty (1993) argues that Indian films have created a 'communal' mode of address, a 'we-ness' of common cultural and national concerns that accounts for their appeal but which is largely a fiction in a country as large and diverse as India. Indian films are subtitled in English at Hausa cinemas, but the majority of those on television (which has the largest audience) are broadcast in Hindi only. This means that most Hausa viewers are watching Indian films in a language of which they have little understanding. After thirty years of watching Indian films Hausa audiences are, of course, sophisticated at understanding the narrative style of the films, and many families have several members who claim they can 'speak' Hindi, but inevitably there is a considerable cultural gap between the intertextual references to local cultural and religious values by Indian films and a Hausa viewing audience.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-IV

Appadurai argues that the new cosmopolitanism brought about by movements of people and capital in the contemporary era has created a deterritorialised world that has new significance for the understanding of media and of imagination (1990, 1991). Media figure prominently in creating interconnections between different peoples who can now consider alternative lives based not on experiences in their own locality but on a range of experiences brought to them through international mass media. As more people throughout the world see their reality 'through the prisms of possible lives offered by the mass media', Appadurai argues that contemporary ethnography must now expand to find ways of understanding the social reality of imagination: 'fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives' (Appadurai, 1991: 198).

The concept of imagination as outlined by Appadurai is helpful in gaining insight into the pleasures that Indian films offer Hausa viewers. (I shall discuss this further below.) It also provides a theoretical way to understand the complicated identifications of audiences and cultural forms that cross expected racial, cultural and national lines. For Hausa viewers, Indian films offer images of a parallel modernity to the West, one intimately concerned with the changing basis of social life, but rooted in conservative cultural values. Characters in Indian films struggle over whether they should speak Hindi or borrow from English, whether they should marry the person they love or wed the person their parents choose. In these and many other decisions like them the narrative tensions of Indian films raise, consider and resolve minor and major anxieties within contemporary Indian society, anxieties that are relevant to Hausa viewers. Moreover, when Hausa youth rework Indian films within their own culture by adopting Indian fashions (such as the headscarves or jewellery of Indian actresses), by copying the music styles for religious purposes, or by using the filmic world of Indian sexual relations to probe the limitations within their own cultural world they can do so without engaging with the heavy ideological load of 'becoming Western'. The popularity of Indian films rests on this delicate balance of being situated between Nigerian 'tradition' and Western 'modernity', offering a mediating space for postcolonial Hausa viewers from which they may reflect on and consider the nature of contemporary social change.

INDIAN FILMS AND HAUSA VIEWERS

One result of the myopia regarding the presence of Indian films in West Africa is that hard data regarding their distribution and exhibition are extremely difficult to come by. Ekwuazi, for instance, borrows from UN statistics to write that in 1978-79 86 per cent of all films imported into Nigeria were of American origin (1987: 121). Yet earlier in the same book he acknowledges that many films come in through a grey market that escapes official notice, and unofficially 'the all-time favourite is the Indian, not the American film' (1987: 44).(7) Whereas all American films were imported through the American Motion Picture Exporters and Cinema Association (AMPECA), later the Nigerian Film Distribution Company (NFDC), Indian films were imported by a host of entrepreneurs in different countries, including the Middle East, England and India. British censorship records reveal that Indian films were first introduced by Lebanese exhibitors in the 1950s who were eager to see whether the diet of American and English films could be supplemented by the odd Arab or Indian one.s These exhibitors speculated that Arabic films would be popular in the north because of the many religious links between northern Nigeria and the Islamic world. As the language of religious practice and debate Arabic carried immense authority, but despite these links the films never became popular on northern Nigerian screens while Indian films came to dominate them.(9)

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities-III

The narrow conception of cultural imperialism has left little place for the study of phenomena such as Hong Kong or Indian film which cannot be as easily tied to a wider economic hegemony as is the case with Hollywood film.(6) This myopia has also been the result of the disciplinary boundaries of contemporary scholarship, which has little ethnographic understanding of cross-cultural media environments. Recent groundbreaking works in African cinema, such as Diawara (1992) and Ukadike (1994; see also Ekwuazi, 1987; Ekwuazi and Nasidi, 1992), deal largely with production by African film makers and are less concerned with what African film audiences are actually watching. Until recently anthropologists, with their disciplinary focus on indigenous cultural production, have been suspicious of foreign mass-mediated cultural forms, no matter how popular they may be (cf. AbuLughod, 1993b; Ginsburg, 1991; Hannerz, 1992). Karin Barber, for instance, in her seminal definition of African popular arts (1987) argues that 'imported commercial entertainments . . . symbolize Western culture (though they include Chinese Kung Fu movies and Indian romantic melodramas)' (1987: 25; her parenthesis). As well as reducing foreign media to a subset of Hollywood, Barber is reluctant to admit any real engagement by African audiences with these texts. Because they do not originate from an African reality she suggests they have little meaning in African life. '[E]ntertainment films that are least mediated by African culture. . . [she concludes] are also the most easily replaced' (ibid.). Barber's observations are probably influenced by her experience among Yoruba, where indigenous videos have provided a popular alternative to imported cinema in recent years. She fails, however, to appreciate the complicated identifications that allow audiences to engage with media forms no matter how superficially 'foreign'. The popularity of Indian films in Africa has fallen into the interstices of academic analysis, as the Indian texts do not fit with studies of African cinema; the African audience is ignored in the growing work on Indian film; the films are too non-Western for Euro-American-dominated media studies, and anthropologists are only beginning to theorise the social importance of media.

My intent is not to downplay the importance of the cultural struggle of Nigerians against foreign media, or to minimise the hegemony of Western culture, but to stress that this is only part of the cultural reality of many African nations. It is necessary to move toward a more ethnographic understanding of the range of the media environments that offer Hausa youth the choice between watching Hausa or Yoruba videos, Indian, Hong Kong or American films, or videos of Qur'anic tafsir (exegesis) by local preachers. In this my work has been influenced heavily by participation in the Program in Culture and Media and its affiliates within the department of anthropology at New York University. Borrowing from media and cultural studies as well as from traditional anthropological theory the Program is developing a variety of critical anthropological perspectives that examine the social relations within which media are embedded and enacted (Abu-Lughod, 1993b, 1995; Ginsburg, 1991, 1993, 1994; McLagan, 1996; Sullivan 1993). Examining the significance of Indian films in an African context, and the processes of identification by which the ideas, values and aesthetics of another culture are incorporated within an African quotidian, is a step further in this developing field. With other approaches to transnational cultural studies such as that emerging from the journal Public Culture, this work is building a sophisticated and supple theoretical frame to deal with what Appadurai terms a 'new cosmopolitanism' that unites the cultural, financial and political flows within and between Western and non-Western countries into a single conceptual whole. 'Modernity,' Appadurai and Breckenridge assert, 'is now everywhere, it is simultaneously everywhere, it is interactively everywhere' (1995: 2).

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities - II

By stressing the importance of modernities that run parallel to the classical paradigm of the West I want to criticise recent work in African studies and media studies that has been dominated by the focus on local 'resistance' to various forms of 'dominant culture'. Abu-Lughod has warned that the 'romance of resistance' tends to focus on the creativity of resistors and fails to explore fully the effectiveness of systems of power (1990). My concern is different, arguing that concepts of resistance in African studies and elsewhere often depend on a reductive binary distinction between oppression and resistance. The effect of this is that phenomena that cannot be neatly organised within that binary distinction then fall out of view. In a recent review essay on African historiography Frederick Cooper addresses some of these concerns:

The difficulty [in contemporary Africanist historiography] is to confront the power behind European expansion without assuming it was all-determining and to probe the clash of different forms of social organisation without treating them as self-contained and autonomous. The binaries of coloniser/colonised, Western/nonWestern and domination/resistance begin as useful devices for opening up questions of power but end up constraining the search for precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflected, and appropriated. [Cooper, 1994: 1517]

Cooper wishes to move away from what he sees as monolithic constructions of civilised coloniser and primitive colonised (and the related labels of modernity and tradition) by asserting the heterogeneity of both colonial rule and African resistances. While complicating the picture, he nevertheless remains wedded to a structural binarism that looks at the organisation of African experience in terms of its response to Western rule and its consequences.

Recent theories of postcolonialism have also unintentionally tended to reify this distinction in that the term 'postcolonial', despite a variety of different definitions, connotes a historical periodisation based on the core period of colonialism.(5) Northern Nigeria, for example, was colonised by the British in 1903, and achieved independence in 1960. A history of over a thousand years is divided into the period pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial which centres less than sixty years of British rule at the heart of Hausa experience. Even while criticising the role of the West in postcolonial Nigerian life, theorists of cultural imperialism and postcolonialism often view Nigerian reality largely in terms of its relation to the West, with the resulting irony of reaffirming cultural imperialism at the same moment as critiquing it. It is as if the periphery could not have an experience independent of its relation to metropolitan centres. Shohat and Stam criticise this contemporary insistence on resistance for producing an 'inverted European narcissism' positing a monolithic West as the source of all evil in the world, and which 'reduces non-Western life to a pathological response to Western domination' (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 3). The widespread popularity of Indian films in Nigeria necessitates a revision of conceptions of global cultural flows that privilege the centrality of the West and refuse to recognise the common historical process of centres and peripheries engaged in contemporary cultural production.

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities

Mamman Shata, 'Mallam Sidi, mijin Hotiho'. 'Mallam Sidi is the husband of Hotiho' (1)

The sight of a 15 ft image of Sridevi, dancing erotically on the screens of the open-air cinemas of northern Nigeria, or the tall, angular figure of Amitabh Bachchan radiating charisma through the snowy, crackly reception of domestic television have become powerful, resonant images in Hausa popular culture. To this day, stickers of Indian films and stars decorate the taxis and buses of the north, posters of Indian films adorn the walls of tailors' shops and mechanics' garages, and love songs from Indian film songs are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed. For over thirty years Indian films, their stars and fashions, music and stories have been a dominant part of everyday popular culture in northern Nigeria. If, as Bakhtin (1981) writes, communication is fundamental to human life, that self and society emerge in dialogue with others surrounding them, then Indian films have entered into the dialogic construction of Hausa popular culture by offering Hausa men and women an alternative world, similar to their own, from which they may imagine other forms of fashion, beauty, love and romance, coloniality and post-coloniality.

Before I began my research I read all I could find by Nigerian and Western scholars on media and film in Nigeria. For the most part, this scholarship dealt with the complex and continuing problem of cultural imperialism - the dominance of Western media and most especially Hollywood films. When I first visited Kano, the major city in northern Nigeria, it came as a surprise, then, that Indian films are shown five nights a week at the cinemas (compared with one night for Hollywood films and one night for Chinese films); that the most popular programme on television was the Sunday morning Indian film on City Television Kano (CTV); and that most video shops reserved the bulk of their space for Indian films (followed by Western and Chinese films, Nigerian dramas and religious videos). The question of why Indian films are so popular among Hausa viewers has occupied much of my research since that time.(2) What pleasures do Hausa viewers take from films portraying a culture and religion that seem so dissimilar and are watched usually in a language they cannot understand? Why has such a prominent part of the popular culture of many African societies received so little attention from academics?(3) This article attempts to answer these questions by taking seriously the significance of Indian films in Hausa culture. It explores the influence of Indian cinema on Hausa social life through the medium of Hausa littatafan soyayya (love stories). This pamphlet-type market literature, which began as recently as 1989, has created a popular reading public for wilful, passionate heroes and heroines who mimic a style of love and sexual interaction found in Indian films. Soyayya books, and videos based on their plots, produce a world where the imagined alternative of Indian romance is incorporated within local Hausa reality.

The popularity of Indian film in Nigeria highlights the circulation of media within and between non-Western countries, an aspect of transnational cultural flows that has been largely ignored in recent theories of globalisation. Indian films offer Hausa viewers a way of imaginatively engaging with forms of tradition different from their own at the same time as conceiving of a modernity that comes without the political and ideological significance of that of the West. After discussing reasons for the popularity of Indian films in a Hausa context, I account for this imaginative investment of viewers by looking at narrative as a mode of social enquiry. Hausa youth explore the limits of accepted Hausa attitudes to love and sexuality through the narratives of Indian film and Hausa love stories. This exploration has occasioned intense public debate, as soyayya authors are accused of corrupting Hausa youth by borrowing from Indian films foreign modes of love and sexual relations. I argue that this controversy indexes wider concerns about the shape and direction of contemporary Nigerian culture. Analysing soyayya books and Indian films gives insight into the local reworking and indigenising of transnational media flows that take place within and between Third World countries, disrupting the dichotomies between West and non-West, coloniser and colonised, modernity and tradition, foregrounding instead the ability of media to create parallel modernities.

The History of Malayalam Cinema

The history of Indian Cinema began at the early part of the twentieth century. Malayalam cinema had to wait a few more decades to get its first film. The first feature film in Malayalam ‘Vigathakumaran’ was released in 1928. Produced and directed by the Chennai returned business man J.C.Daniel, who himself handled the role of the protagonist, the film stood apart with a social theme while mythological films ruled the film arena all over India.

Kerala had to wait another five years to get its next film, but only to be shelved after a few exhibitions due to a legal entanglement. ‘Marthandavarma’ based on the famous novel by C.V. Raman Pillai was produced by Sunderraj, a historical silent film, would have had a great impact on the cinema of South India if it had not met with legal confrontation.

The first Malayalam cinema with a sound track was released in 1938. The film ‘Balan’ produced by R.Sundaram and directed by Notani was a melodrama with more Tamil influence than Malayalam. Following the commercial success of ‘Balan’, more films like ‘Jnambika’(1940) and ‘Prahlada’(1941) came out to the theatres. P.J.Cheriyan’s ‘Nirmala’ (1948) was the first film to explore the possibility of music and songs in cinema. The lyrics of the film penned by the legendary Malayalam poet G.Shankara Kurup became so popular that song-dance sequences became essential ingredients of Malayalam cinema.

‘Jeevithanouka’ (1951) a melodramatic musical could be considered as the first ‘super-hit’ film with the first Malayalam ‘super-star’, Thikkurishi Sukumaran Nair. The success formula of ‘Jeevithanouka’ was repeated for many films to come out after that till the path breaking film ‘Neelakuyil’ saw the light.

‘Neelakuyil’ (1954) broke away from the Tamil – Hindi influence of Malayalam cinema and had an authentic story penned by renowned writer Uroob. Directed by the duo of P.Bhaskaran and Ramu Karyat, the film dealt with the story of untouchables prevailed in the society. This also was the first Malayalam film shot outdoors and also the first film to be recognised in the National level.

The next year saw yet another novel venture in Malayalam cinema. A group of students, influenced by the wave of neo-realism in the West, ventured out to produce the film ‘Newspaper Boy’, directed by P.Ramadas. The film which came out even before Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’, dealt with the issue of poverty.

The first full-length colour film of Malayalam came out in 1960, ‘Kandam Bacha Coat’, which otherwise was a film of no much relevance.

‘Chemmeen’ (1965) directed by Ramu Karyat was the first South Indian film to bag the President's Golden Lotus Award for the best film. Based on the famous novel by renowned Malayalam writer Takazhi Shivashanakara Pillai, ‘Chemmeen’ pioneered the growth of Malayalam cinema in technical and artistic aspects. It brought together some of the best technical talents then available in India, Salil Chowdhari (music), Markes Burtly (cinematography) and Hrishikesh Mukhargee (editing). It also had a huge star cast.

Some of the films like P.N.Menon’s ‘Oolavum Theeravum’ (1969) announced the arrival of a great movement, which changed the face of Malayalam cinema during the early 1970s.

The early 1970s witnessed a radical change in the perspective towards cinema by filmmakers as well as film viewers of Kerala. The beginning of film society movement resulted in the exposure to world classics, which helped a group of young filmmakers realise the uniqueness of the language of this medium, which till then was in the clutches of the forms used for stage dramas. Influenced by the French and Italian New Wave, as elsewhere in India, the Malayalam New Wave was born. The arrival of young filmmakers from the newly constituted Film Institute in Pune acted as a catalyst for this radical change.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s ‘Swayamvaram’ (1972) unplugged a stream of extraordinary films, often termed as ‘Parallel Cinema’, by film institute trained and self-taught young directors, which surpassed the superficiality of mere story telling and made maximum use of the possibilities cinema as a medium. Through ‘Uttarayanam’ (1974) G.Aravindan joined this movement followed by directors like P.A.Backer with ‘Kabani Nadi Chuvannappol’ (1975), K.P.Kumaran with ‘Athithi’ (1975) and K.R.Mohanan with ‘Ashwathama’ (1978). Renowned writer M.T.Vasudevan Nair made his directorial debut with ‘Nirmalyam’ (1973), which won the Golden lotus award, during this period. Padmarajan and K.G.George who later became the proponents of the stream of cinema often termed ‘Middle Cinema’ too made their debuts in 1979 with their films ‘Swapnadanam’ and ‘Peruvazhiyambalam’ respectively.

Even though the Parallel Cinema movement had a slow down during 1980s, some of the best films of Malayalam cinema from directors like Adoor and Aravindan came out during this period. Shaji.N.Karun’s ‘Piravi’ (1988) created stir in the International Film Festival circuits and refreshed the Malayali film sensibility. The major development during this decade was the growth of another stream of Malayalam cinema, the ‘Middle Cinema’, which fused the artistic qualities of ‘Parallel Cinema’ and the popular form of the commercial Malayalam cinema. This resulted in the birth of a number of films with down to earth stories, but with most of them becoming commercial successes. K.G.George with his films ‘Kolangal’ (1980), ‘Yavanika’ (1982), ‘Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback’ (1983), ‘Adaminte Variyellu’ (1983) and ‘Irakal’ (1985), P.Padmarajan with his films like ‘Oridathoru Phayalwan’ (1981), Koodevide? (1983), ‘Namakku Parkan Munthiri Thoppukal’ (1986), ‘Moonnampakkam’ (1988) and ‘Aparan’ (1988), Bharathan with ‘Lorry’ (1980), ‘Marmaram’ (1982) and ‘Ormakkayi’ (1982), Mohan with ‘Vidaparayum Munpe’ (1981), Lenin Rajendran with ‘Chillu’ (1982) and ‘Meenamasathile Sooryan’ (1985), Pavithran with ‘Uppu’ (1986) and K.S.Sethumadhavan with ‘Oppol’ (1980) all were strong presence in Malayalam cinema during the 80s.

Barring films from Adoor, Aravindan and Shaji 1990s didn’t see much good films. Murali Nair’s film ‘Maranasimhasanam’ (1999) was an exception. T.V.Chandran who started with ‘Alicinte Anveshanam’ (1989) too continued with his films like ‘Ponthan Mada’ (1993) ‘Ormakalundayirikanam’ (1995) and ‘Mankamma’ (1997). The commercial cinema came out with films cut-off from the real Kerala society and larger than human chauvinist characters. Soft porno films too flooded the theatres, which won huge commercial gains.

The new millennium too didn’t had much to offer to Malayalam cinema, though some works like Sarath’s ‘Sayahnam’ (2000) and ‘Stithi’ (2002), Satish Menon’s ‘Bhavam’ (2002), Rajiv Vijayaraghavan’s ‘Margam’ (2003), T V Chandran’s ‘Susannah’ (2001), ‘Danny’ (2001), ‘Padam Onnu Oru Vilapam’ (2003) and ‘Kathavasheshan’ (2004), Adoor’s ‘Nizhalkkuthu’ (2004) and Pradip Nair’s ‘Oridam’ (2005) came out during this period.