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Sensational Movies
Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana
By Birgit Meyer UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96265-1
CHAPTER 1
The Video Film Industry
Having watched Diabolo in the Rex Cinema in December of 1991, I was eager to speak to William Akuffo, who had produced, directed, and edited the movie. Since I stayed mainly in the Volta region, it took some months before we met (in June 1992) in a small room, furnished with a TV and video deck, at the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC). Although Akuffo had no formal link with this institution, the GFIC premises were the obvious place to meet with anyone involved in movie production. Intending to further analyze the movie, I was eager to get a copy that I could take home to the Netherlands. Since the movie had been shot with a video camera, I expected that a request for a copy of the cassette would not be problematic. This was not the case. Akuffo had one "master" tape (the immediate product of editing) and a limited number of copies of the film that were used in exhibition. Precisely because the technological properties of video made it easy to copy and pirate cassettes — this happened on a large scale with foreign movies that were sent home by Ghanaians abroad — Akuffo made sure that he was in control of the way the copies were used. At that time video movies were screened only in cinema houses, and there was no possibility to buy copies anywhere in town. Akuffo or his assistants would take a copy to the venue where the movie was to be screened, count the number of viewers to make sure he would receive the producer's share of the admission fee, and then take the cassette home after the show. Having explained my motivation as a researcher and perhaps having impressed Akuffo a bit with my interpretation and the prospect of his being discussed in a scholarly article, I eventually gained his trust and received a copy of the cassette. When we met again in 1996 and my article featuring his movie had appeared (Meyer 1995; see also Wendl 1999), he told me that many of the other filmmakers had declared him crazy for giving a copy of his cassette to an unknown lady, who could easily abuse his trust and pirate the film.
I mention this early encounter with Akuffo — long before I started my actual research on the video scene in 1996 — to make clear that the technological characteristics of the medium of video, rather than determining a particular use, offer a range of possibilities that are subject to negotiation (see also Spielmann 2008). In other words the affordances of video technology entail certain constraining and yet not fixed possibilities for action that enable a particular use (Hutchby 2001). Initially, producers had no interest in selling home-video cassettes to the public. Instead, video was hailed as a technology that could be adopted in the realm of cinema and operate as a substitute for celluloid. While the easy accessibility, cheapness, and portability of video technology were welcomed, the intrinsic possibility for mass reproduction was a constant source of worry for producers who wanted to hold this reproduction in check. As Brian Larkin put it in his thought-provoking study of media technologies and urban imaginary in Nigeria, "What media are, needs to be interrogated, not presumed" (Larkin 2008, 3). The point, then, is to explore the nexus of technical affordances, the meanings attached to the technologies, their aesthetics, and their use in a particular social setting.
This chapter traces the rise of the video industry and follows its development until 2010. After setting the scene with a brief sketch of colonial and postindependence cinema, I distinguish three major shifts that transformed practices of movie production, distribution, and consumption: (1) the rise of video and the end of state film production, entailing the sale of the GFIC to a Malaysian private company in November 1996 (mid-1980s–1996); (2) the transition from reliance on hitherto state-run venues for movie (post)production and exhibition to the rise of a new commercial field, bringing about a shift from cinema screenings to the marketing of home videos (late 1996–2001); and (3) the phenomenal popularity of Nigerian movies, implying the transition from video to VCD (a cheap alternative to DVD) and from analog to digital (2002–10). Video technology, as this chapter will show, entailed new possibilities for shared popular imaginaries to evolve and become public in a way that was no longer fully controlled by the state yet all the same was shaped and constrained by older social-political uses of cinema, which placed strong emphasis on film as promoting the moral education of the nation. There was no clear and immediate break with state cinema after the adoption of video; rather, a set of gradual transitions emerged, yielding new contradictions, constraints, and possibilities that have characterized the industry over the past thirty years.
CELLULOID CINEMA IN THE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL PERIODS
Cinema in Colonial Ghana: 1920s–1957
For informed discussion on the film industry in Ghana today, a detailed history of the industry still needs to be written. Available historical documents indicate that the first cinema in the Gold Coast, the Cinematographic Palace, was opened in 1913 by the British company John Holt Bartholomew Ltd. in Accra (Pinther 2010, 94). Then in 1922 the Palladium Cinema opened its doors to the viewing public. The fact that Palladium served as a dance hall for the local elite (Prais 2014) shows that, at the time, cinema was at the center of modern urban entertainment. Its owner, John Ocansey, a wealthy Ga who also founded the first Ghanaian bank, set up more theaters in other parts of the country (Mensah 1989, 9). In the course of the 1930s Ocansey, Bartholomew, and other entrepreneurs deployed cinema vans to tour the countryside (especially the cocoa-growing areas). Films were imported from India, America, and Britain. Usually, they were split into sections, so that screening a full movie took three or four nights (Mensah 1989, 9). In the 1930s, when synchronized dialogue was becoming the norm in new movie productions, most films shown in the Gold Coast were still "silent," because for technical reasons many cinemas could not play the sound that went with "talkies." Some people were employed to interpret film episodes into English and the local languages. Regarding the exhibition of movies as part of legitimate commercial activities, up to the 1940s the colonial administration interfered with the field of cinema solely through censorship and taxes (which were paid according to the length of a film).
In the initial period of the establishment of cinema, the Gold Coast colonial administration did not regard film as a vehicle for addressing the "natives." Tellingly, in a response to a report of the Colonial Films Committee dispatched via the Colonial Office in London in 1931, the acting governor expressed his doubts about the effectiveness of employing film in the service of education: "Local cinematograph proprietors maintain that educational or cultural films do not attract audiences and that they are compelled to depend more or less entirely on the more thrilling or amusing type of film to ensure satisfactory attendance." In response to a request to report on "the influence, good and bad, that cinema has on backward races in the countries directly and indirectly under your control," the secretary for native affairs and the director of education wrote a memorandum in 1933 that states that there were six cinema halls in the Gold Coast, showing about 180 films a month. Both authors stressed that there was "careful censorship" (as the archival files show, at times this evoked protests on the part of exhibitors) and that "there is no reason to think that the films exhibited locally have any moral effect demoralizing or otherwise." Only a small percentage of the population had access to movies, and films had "but little influence on the audiences." In 1938 there were eleven cinematograph theaters listed (five of them located in Accra and the others in cocoa-growing and gold mining areas).
Only at the beginning of World War II did the colonial administration adopt the medium of film as a means of education and promotion of the colonial project. Subsequently, the British Ministry for Information acquired the rights to show films, which were supplied "free of charge to Colonial Governments," and its Information Services Department produced and distributed films considered suitable to local colonial settings. Established in the Gold Coast in 1940, this department made use of cinema vans to organize film shows in the rural and urban areas, where it would assemble people in open-air spaces "to show documentary films and newsreels to explain the colonial government's policies to people in towns and villages free of charge" (Sakyi 1996, 9). An important feature of these open-air film screenings was propaganda films about the war produced by the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) in London (see also Diawara 1992, 3). Commercial cinema owners were required to screen CFU movies in addition to their own programming. Since watching movies was gradually becoming a popular leisure activity, in 1932, a Lebanese, Salim Captan, established Captan Cinema Company and ventured into the film industry by acquiring the Palladium Cinema; later it bought all the other cinema houses previously owned by Ocansey. In 1940 Salim Captan opened Opera Cinema and later a number of new cinema theaters in Accra (including Olympia, Orion, and Oxford), Kumasi, and some important towns in the cocoa-growing areas. Another Lebanese company, West Africa Pictures Limited, ran cinema houses in Accra, including the Plaza, Rex, Royal, Regal, and Roxy. In 1950 the Indian Nankani family also opened a number of cinemas in Kumasi. These exhibition companies also engaged in film distribution and shared movies with each other.
After the war the CFU also started to produce educational films and a number of feature movies that were screened in Britain's African colonies. Contrasting the Western and African way of life, these movies presented the former as an embodiment of "civilization" and the latter as "backward" and "superstitious" customs to be abandoned (see Diawara 1992, 3; 1994, 44–48; see also Larkin 2008, 73–122, on colonial cinema in Nigeria). Film thus was closely related to governmental and imperial interests and employed to create loyal subjects. Placing film in the service of "civilization," the CFU was suspicious of Western movies — especially of American origin — that ridiculed or undermined the sense of Western superiority that the colonial power sought to convey to Africans (Diawara 1992, 1; Bloom 2008, 150). At the same time, as cinema operators continued to show foreign movies, film screening was never fully controlled by the colonial authorities; the latter were even obliged to at least partly give in to audiences' yearning for entertainment and show them their beloved Charlie Chaplin or cowboy movies after a number of educational films made by the CFU had been screened. From the 1950s, cinema started booming, spreading into the popular neighborhoods and traditional Ga areas in Accra and exposing viewers to mainly foreign films (Pinther 2010, 101–2). Many of the cinema houses built at that time were open-air and stood for a modern form of commercialized leisure that addressed more or less anonymous strangers as a new urban public.
The Gold Coast Film Unit (founded in 1948 as part of the Information Services Department), which was to produce local educational films, took up themes perceived to be particularly relevant to the Gold Coast (Bloom and Skinner 2009–10; Mensah 1989, 11). These movies, too, were to serve colonial interests, and the focus was on promoting "purposes of better health, better crops, better living, better marketing and better human co-operation in the colonies" (Middleton-Mends 1995, 1; see also Diawara 1992, 5). As these objectives were thought to be best achieved "on the native soil with native characters" (Middleton-Mends 1995, 1), the unit trained African filmmakers. With the exception of one feature film, The Boy Kumasenu (Bloom and Skinner 2009–10; Garritano 2013, 33–46) all these films were newsreels and documentaries. As Mensah concludes: "So films mainly on subjects like the 'Police' and others bordering on law and order were produced to influence the people to respect the orders of the colonial government. Quite a few documentaries were however designed to educate on health, agriculture, civic responsibilities and current affairs" (Mensah 1989, 12; see also Morton-Williams 1953 for his study of audience receptions of these movies; and Meyer 2003a: 205–7). Also, as Kodjo Senah told me, there were quite a lot of advertisements — for instance for Barclays Bank or toothpaste from Lever Brothers — that promoted British products.
As the medium and mediator of colonialism, colonial films clearly were meant above all to "educate" the people. Film was to contribute to the colonial effort to produce a new kind of colonial subject who would acknowledge British superiority and agree to be "civilized" while resisting the dangers of modernity, especially the immorality of the city, the drive for selfish riches, and the discarding of family ties (Bloom and Skinner 2009–10). Nonetheless, colonial cinema cannot be reduced to these aims. Starting as a commercial enterprise, cinema generated a new audience with clear preferences for entertainment rather than "education" (as advocated by CFU films) and contributed to the rise of leisure and a new urban public culture (see Akyeampong and Ambler 2002; Barber 1997a; Martin 1995; Pinther 2010, 100). Thus, from the outset, cinema in Ghana was characterized by tensions between education, as propagated by the colonial authorities, and the realm of entertainment, as perceived by local populations. While colonial authorities did not oppose entertainment, per se, they were suspicious of certain aspects of commercial cinema. Offering, as Prais (2014, 202) puts it, "new vocabularies and images of modernity," as well as lessons to perform it, cinema emerged together with a deeply moral discourse about the virtues and dangers of film (see also Larkin 2008).
Cinema in Independent Ghana: 1957 to Mid-1980s
After independence in 1957, the Gold Coast Film Unit was transformed into the Ghana Film Unit and, in 1961, renamed the Ghana Film Production Corporation (Mensah 1989, 41). The main purpose of cinema being educational, there was a clear continuity between colonial and postcolonial policies. Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah (1957–66), attributed much importance to the medium of film in "educating," "uplifting," and "enlightening" the population and "explaining" state institutions, health interventions, and other policies to the young nation. Above all, film was to contribute to the emergence and consolidation of a national culture and identity. The ideal spectator addressed by state cinema discourse was a loyal subject, grounded in Nkrumah's vision of "African personality" (Nkrumah 1964; Hagan 1993; Schramm 2000, 340–41). This entailed pride in indigenous cultural roots and trust in the role of the government as the key instance for safeguarding African culture and identity. Film was to operate in line with Nkrumah's cultural policy of Sankofa. Referring to the Akan image of a bird turning its head backward — meaning "go back and take" — Sankofa came to stand for a politics of culture that proudly incorporates certain traditional cultural forms and values as a means to move forward. Highlighting the importance of the past, Sankofa nonetheless stresses the importance of progress, the point being to bring together development and African cultural traditions (instead of opposing them, as had been the case in colonial times). In this regard film not only exemplified modern technology but also signified modernity itself and was found to be a particularly powerful means to conjoin African culture and modern "development."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sensational Movies by Birgit Meyer. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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