Fellini, Godard and training Nollywood

In an interview included as an extra on the DVD, director Lina Wertmuller, who had served as an assistant on the set of 8½, reveals that Fellini, who started out as a screenwriter, didn’t use scripts. Wertmuller told of how the French critic Jean Rougeul, who had been invited to act the character of a […]

In an interview included as an extra on the DVD, director Lina Wertmuller, who had served as an assistant on the set of 8½, reveals that Fellini, who started out as a screenwriter, didn’t use scripts. Wertmuller told of how the French critic Jean Rougeul, who had been invited to act the character of a critic in the film, wanted to see a script. They would give him the lines to memorize each night, and he would come on set prepared, only to be given new lines, forcing him to improvise.

According to the New Wave Film website, this apparently was also much the way idolized director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of French “New Wave” filmmaking, operated.  Although he had long been involved in ciné-clubs where he skipped out on university classes to spend most of his time watching Hollywood films with friends and had begun to write film criticism, he was turned down when he applied for film school. Although he had no formal film training, he worked as a freelance editor and scriptwriter. Similarly, Raoul Coutard, cinematographer on the first feature film Godard directed, A Bout de Souffle/Breathless (1960), had been a war photographer but had no training in cinematography. Coutard recalls in an interview with The Observer that Godard wanted to make his film for as cheap as possible, meaning that they often shot on the streets: “We didn’t have permissions or anything. We just went into the boulevards, like the Champs-Élysées and filmed […].” Neither was Godard working from a script: “There was the original press article on which Truffaut had based his story outline, but every day Jean-Luc would just turn up with his little exercise book and scribble some notes and some dialogue and we would rehearse maybe a couple of times so I knew where to point the camera vaguely.” Coutard adds that their process was “all new to cinema, but as none of us really knew how to do any different, it didn’t feel like a risk.”

What interests me in this history is the similarity between methods of filmmaking used by some of the world’s most celebrated independent filmmakers and techniques used by filmmakers in Nigeria’s emergent cinema. Most of the filmmakers I know in Kannywood spend hours watching and communally analyzing films from India, China, America, and Nigeria, adapting into their own low-budget filmmaking techniques they have absorbed. In this informal education, they are not that different from the French New Wave filmmakers, whose vision grew out of interaction with the hundreds of Hollywood films they watched. However, these movements largely differ in the lack of institutional support from film critics and investors in Nigeria, who rather than engaging intellectually with the innovative new styles created by Nigerian filmmakers and becoming involved in film themselves (with a few exceptions), often scold filmmakers for not making films “properly” according to international textbook formulas.

Now, I am not arguing for disorganization in filmmaking or not having a script. Indeed, according to the Newwavefilm.com biography of Godard, American actor Jack Palance was frustrated by Godard’s directing on the set of the film Le Mepris, saying “We never know in advance what we’re going to do. There’s almost no dialogue. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had! It’s madness!” Similarly, in the films I’ve participated in as an amateur, I much preferred those films where actors were given a script to rehearse ahead of time over those films where there was only a scene list and no rehearsal time. If one is aiming for the kind of film Hollywood makes, then it makes sense to pay attention to how Hollywood does it. Though Fellini and Godard are hailed as some of the world’s greatest filmmakers, their films are often self-indulgent and inaccessible—not necessarily the sort of films that will sell well to a popular audience in Nigeria.

However, these examples from European independent filmmaking point to a variety of creative processes that exist. As a teacher, I am a proponent of education, but I am wary of those who imply one is not a real filmmaker unless one has been trained in school or workshop to follow the proper formula. In recent years there has been a rush to bring in foreign experts to train Nigerian filmmakers. I would simply warn that we must take such training with a grain of salt, adopting those “rules” that are useful and leaving aside those that are not. For example, despite my own preference for a script, some of the best performances I’ve seen in Nigerian films have been improvised by talented actors, whereas some of the most wooden ones I’ve seen are actors trying to faithfully stick to badly written dialogue. To insist that spontaneity is “unprofessional” ignores both the reality on the ground and the history of world cinema in which some of the world’s greatest films have been partially improvised.

In a recent article for Capital New York, Andrew Rice points out that the New York Film Academy, which charged $5000 per person for one month courses in Lagos last year, commands little respect in the United States, but has done well with its branding abroad. Indeed some of Nigeria’s most well-known directors have done stints with NYFA, including Chineze Anyaene, Kunle Afolayan, Stephanie Okereke, and most recently Kannywood directors Ishaq Sidi Ishaq and Sani Mu’azu.  Rice quotes NYFA Lagos coordinator Brad Ben-Hain, as saying “There is a way of doing things in Nigeria. We’re here to bring a change to that.” Despite this mission, these American instructors’ credits seem to mostly include short films, television series, and commercials. I have observed this at other filmmaking workshops where Nigerian directors who have made dozens of feature films patiently listen to instruction from teachers who have only directed one or two short films but have been trained abroad. While there is always room for learning, especially in technical skills like camerawork and editing, and while exposure to other ways of filmmaking is valuable, I find this imbalance troubling.

I’m sure that these training programmes are somewhat useful to those who attend them, but as I read the stories of Fellini and Godard, I wonder if perhaps the more relevant education is not exposure to a wide variety of films and experience on set. This is an education film critics could use, as well.