Transcultural Communication by Hepp Andreas;

Author:Hepp, Andreas; [Hepp, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

This orientation to specific problems of postcolonial Africa helps explain why Nollywood films can been seen as “larger regional representations” of Africa: the films deal with local problems with a crudity that one is not used to with Hollywood productions. They have also stimulated further African film production, for example Hausa films, which are named after the second most common language used in these productions. Hausa films are made in Northern Nigerian, adopting the song and dance esthetic of Bollywood films, and dealing with the problems of a rural population in romantic stories (Adamu 2011; Larkin 2008: 194–208).

What can we conclude from the films produced in Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood? First of all, it can be seen that the common view in Europe, that the transcultural communication of film means the diffusion of Hollywood films, is very partial. The examples drawn on here demonstrate that, in other parts of the world, other film representations are far more important for transcultural communication than those of Hollywood. The issue becomes more complex when we acknowledge that we have here drawn only on three countries with a significant level of film production. A genuinely global perspective would have to deal with China (Lee 2011), Russian film making (Gillespie 2002), and various European (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010) or Arabic films (Mellor et al. 2011: 103–22) as resources for transcultural communication.

These three examples make plain the multilayered nature of the communicative figurations within which these representations are bound up, or created by them. The example of Bollywood and Nollywood demonstrate that films available transculturally may still make use of national representations, especially where issues raised in relation to a particular national setting are (culturally) accessible beyond it. It is also evident that, even if Bollywood and Nollywood representations do not, like Hollywood, aim from the start at a “world market,” they are nonetheless generally marked by transculturation. Indian films draw on various elements of European cinema, while Nollywood draws in equal measure on Hollywood and Nollywood, developing on this basis, however, films quite specific to postcolonial Africa. Transculturation is thus a basic element of these film representations. This does not imply that the differences between these films are simply leveled into a “global film culture.” The rise of the Internet and the progressive digitalization of the media has not changed any of this. Rather, we should identify contextually the communicative figurations into which these films are bound, and what in each individual case this means.

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