If you are a regular follower of Nollywood movies, you would have
noticed the latest characteristics of unnecessary screaming and shouting
by the actors and actresses and you wonder whether they have hearing
problems or just suffering from Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD).
I
have once mentioned about Nollywood actresses cat walking in their
nightgowns when they alone in bedroom and you wonder whether Ini Edo is
swaying her buttocks to herself or for the camera men?
By the
screaming and shouting matches scenes in their trailers they erroneously
think their histrionics will make people rush to the cinemas to watch
their teleplays being shown at the local cinemas?
As the veteran
Nigerian filmmaker Chief Eddie Ugbomah said that what should have been
given to TV stations as television drama is rushed to the local cinemas
that are showing home videos starring popular Nollywood stars even if
its crap, because there are not enough good foreign movies to show to
make ends meet, otherwise they will not be able to make enough from the
box office to keep the generators running and pay salaries. But should
that be enough excuse not to insist on showing good movies and not stage
dramas shot on video?
Only few Nollywood producers are really
making good movies and even their movies have not brought out the best
in our actors and actresses as noted by the Nollywood diva Nse Ikpe-Etim
who said she is yet to see the screenplay that will truly challenge her
acting skills. And you should not blame her, because poor dialogues are
the signatures of Nollywood movies.
There are good screenwriters
in Nigeria, but the majority of the Nollywood producers prefer mediocre
writers they can pay chicken feed.
Only few Nollywood producers
know that acting for the stage is different from acting for film. That
is why we see a lot of stage dramatics in Nollywood movies, because
majority of them studied and trained for the stage and not for film. And
the tragedy of it all is that the best Nollywood actors and actresses
are now retiring unfulfilled, because the Nollywood producers have
failed to bring out the best in them in the 20 years of Nollywood.
Many
people in Nollywood don't even know that the history of motion pictures
in Nigeria is decades older than Nollywood. And they don't want to
learn from the history of the Nigerian film industry.
This year
is the 40 years of the making of the film adaption of Chinua Achebe's
all time classic novel Things Fall Apart directed by German filmmaker
Hansjuergen Jason Pohland in 1972 for Francis Oladele's Calpenny-Nigeria
Films Ltd. But unfortunately the director does not even have a copy of
this important film that would be of immense benefit to both students
and scholars of African cinema and African Literature.
The
energies Nollywood actors and actresses waste in their shouting matches
would be better spent in sober reflections on how best to improve the
quality of Nollywood movies to compare with the international award
winning movies of South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo, Cameroon,
Algeria, Tunisa and the rest of the world where quality makes more sense
than the noise of the empty barrels in Nollywood.
source:nigeriafilms
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