With African Video Movies and Global Desires, Carmela Garritano has established her place among the major interpreters of contemporary African video films, alongside Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Birgit Meyer, John McCall, and others whose groundbreaking work has served to establish a new field of cinema studies and a new approach to African cinema. This is all the more significant in that the subject of her study is what she has defined as a minor cinema in the shadow of a minor cinema, that is, Ghanaian cinema as the junior cousin of Nollywood.

But this is only a frame of reference: the actual subject of her study is the tracking of global South cinema in an age of globalization and neoliberalism. Her work reaches out to the theorizing of South Asian and Latin American film, but is firmly grounded in Ghanaian history, society, and culture. Her personal observations—as in those involving the backgrounds and thoughts of major figures in the industry, key directors like Bob Smith or Socrate Safo, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, and Veronica Quarshie, and many important producers and distributors—mark this study with her astute judgments. Since she experienced part of the period of the effulgent growth of Ghanaian video while living in Ghana, visiting the new mall with its multiplex cinema as well as the small quartier projection sites, and viewing in person the work of the filmmakers, we learn directly of the look and feel of the place, the viewers, and their world. The “culture” of cultural studies is conveyed in its immediacy, while the theorizing about “Culture” is informed by the major writings of James Ferguson, Achille Mbembe, Timothy Mitchell, Sarah Nuttall, Brian Larkin, John and Jean Comaroff, Simon During, and others, and of film studies scholars like Tom Gunning, Moradewun Adejunmobi, and Stephen Heath. Historians and critics of Ghanaian culture and film also abound. Garritano has seemingly read and absorbed them all—Birgit Meyer, Stephanie Newell, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Esi Dogbe, D. J. Smith, and others.

By centering her work in the Ghanaian film industry, Garritano has constructed a portrait of the globalized local centered in Accra and Kumasi, as well as in locations of Ghanaians living abroad. The context shapes our understanding of cinema studies “today”—that is, in terms of what context comes to mean in its local parameters in an age of global cultural flows. What distinguishes this study, however, is not the mobilization of the work of others—thorough and sensible though it is—but the author’s original approaches in reading the cinema and its import. She establishes a baseline of what Ghanaian audiences and filmmakers understand as “professional” cinema—what we might otherwise define as commercial film, mainstream, or Hollywood cinema—in contrast to the variants of the local or minor cinemas in Ghana, often marked by melodramatic or magical indices. Instead of these familiar video film/telenovella genres marking an endpoint for her, they are starting points for more sophisticated elaborations on the directions local filmmakers have taken in pushing the envelope of what is possible, given the constraints of competition with Nollywood. For instance, her analysis of “travel” films, involving Ghanaians traveling to or living abroad, extends the sense of Ferguson’s “coevalness” in a transnational practice—elaborated through her readings of the approaches taken by Socrate Safo and Bob Smith in films set in Ghana and Italy, Amsterdam, or New York, and marked by current conditions of travel and expatriation.

The nature of “travel film” today might be seen not simply in the lives and dependencies of those living in the Ghanaian diaspora in relationship to those at home, but also in relationship to the structures of representation of their cultural singularity. Not only do filmmakers like Smith and Safo construct an image of “abroad”—at times using previously shot footage, at times tricking the viewers’ eyes, at times tricking authorities in airports in Europe, at times manipulating local sets (recasting the techniques of Hollywood in its age of The African Queen)—but more pertinently, their films are marketed in the Bronx, Peckham Rye, and Amsterdam, across the tracks of a cultural migration that no longer resembles that of its forebears. The marketing centers—formerly small grocery stores or beauty salons, and now shops with thousands of titles—are nodes of new African homelands where geographies are virtualized into the spaces for what Garritano calls “video movies,” popular, cheap, and highly sought-after expressions of a familiar ambience, the community tied to the new locations of home. More important than the details marking this construction is the understanding of why these films represent the contemporary African face of cinema preoccupied with wealth, moral and sexual intricacies, and longings or desires unimaginable in the past. When Garritano concludes her chapter on travel with the statement that “the intense focus on remittances and connections to home in these and earlier travel movies demonstrates that in the postnationalist, postcolonial era of global capitalism, citizens of the African postcolony no longer look to the nation-state to ensure their livelihoods” (153), she is also and especially gesturing to how those citizens are also no longer looking to their cinemas for either national edification or entertainment as they had done in the past.

This new look is best captured in the chapter dealing with “sakawa” films, that is, movies hooked into 419 scams, Nollywoodian tricksters, or Ghanaian figures of hip derision and immorality, which provide the ultimate pleasures involved in having your cake—that is, viewing vast wealth on display—and eating it too—that is, tching over its immorality. She explains that sakawa movies “articulate discontent about everyday corruption, punishing those characters who engage in dishonest practices to get rich or who use their wealth selfishly and immorally, and simultaneously these movies play to the audience’s desire to have wealth” (191). Hucksterism isn’t new, but the Internet is, and the pleasures linked to money-money “also derive from [these movies’] capacity to visualize Internet enchantment and money magic” (191)—involving what Garritano calls “particular iterations of invisibility” with the digital flow of capital, images, and impulses.

In evoking one set of films that constitute this genre, Garritano compares them to the more conventionalized, ideologically normalized, and more expensively produced “professional” films of Shirley Frimpong-Manso, for whom the pleasures of consumption and the imagery of luxury are never troubled by self-reflexivity, and where the “gaps between lack and plenitude” are obscured (194). Here the work of Frimpong-Manso evokes that of Veronica Quarshie, for whom the work of consumption is “seamlessly embedded” in the films’ narratives. The placement of the camera enhances this smooth “presentationist” approach, which gives us access to the pleasures of wealth without self-consciously troubling desire—global desire, placed in globalized imaginaries. This is the ultimate destination of African films’ traveling toward cinematic professionalization, and it is accomplished at the expense of the local look, where the camera returns the spectator to the familiar perspective of one’s own self and world, a world marked by the spectacle made for a viewer “in a situation of lack” (127).

Here we have the strongest claims of African Video Movies, where the meaning of a local, minor cinema takes on precise meaning in its deployment of practices that situate its spectators in a space delimited by the camera technique, as well as in its use of setting and amateur actors, thus creating an alternative to the dominant global cinematic flow of “professional” films. Garritano explains how Veronica Quarshie’s films “close off the social” by their techniques of suturing, camerawork, and the projection of desire, so as to represent “the good life that very few actually enjoy in Ghana as if it were the everyday experienced by most”(127). In contrast, the performative “incompetence” in the earlier films’ spectacles of display returned the viewer to a locally familiar space where the absence of professionalism enhanced the construction of familiar tropes of Ghanaian worldliness. The impossibility of policing a national border and of keeping out Nollywood films compelled Ghanaian directors to reinvent their craft by reimagining a new form of the local—new forms of utilizing digital filmmaking, digital pirating, digital distributing, digital patrolling.

Garritano provides all the details of the historical development of these processes in Ghanaian film, always gesturing toward their counterparts elsewhere in the continent and in the global South. She shows, in the end, how Nollywood imposed the necessity for a transnational collaboration that changed the “survival strategies” of the filmmakers and generated aesthetic choices—choices that were consequences of major industry practices imposed on minor players, “major-to-minor forms of transnationalism” (166). The phrase serves to describe this study as well. It provides the “major” thinking we need to comprehend the parameters of globalization and culture in Africa filmmaking and viewing, but it takes on life in providing the details of a local cinema. It is especially valuable in making sense of that specific context by redefining the working of the local in a transnational practice. The result is a new, enriched understanding of minor cinema, complicated in the way Garritano sees Nollywood, which itself is complicated by the global shadows of the majors, with cultural references “not entirely determined by or free of” Western or outside influences, enacting a double movement of “imitation and reinvention”(166‒67).

African film may always have been marked by such rhythms, but in order to understand the dance of culture today it is necessary to become familiar with the details of the workings of specific filmmaking practices and current social constructions. This study is invaluable in making sense of the mechanisms of that practice and their products—of the apparatuses of African video filmmaking and what has been done within its horizon of possibility. It also suggests that in our thinking about the “major‒minor” relationship imposed by the global North, we invert the direction of that flow and imagine that what is seen in the “minor” of today is the adumbration of tomorrow’s “major.”