African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

cinema with a Ghanaian performance tradition, in this case, the concert party. Adapted from a stage play by concert party artist Bob Cole, I Told You So tells the story of a poor girl whose mother pressures her to marry a rich stranger, who, in the end, is revealed to be a diamond smuggler. The film’s close affiliation with the popular concert party theater and its incorporation of highlife music and performances by Bob Cole and the African Brothers Band undoubtedly accounted for its wide appeal. Music figures even more prominently in Bernard Odjidja’s Doing Their Thing (1972). The first color film made in Ghana, Doing Their Thing features The El Pollos and Kwanyako Brass Bands, two popular highlife bands that performed widely in the 1970s. In 1975, Aryeetey embarked on several unsuccessful coproductions, including Contact: The African Deal (1973), which was directed by Giorgio Bontempi and produced with Ital Victoria, and The Visitor (1979), a musical tour coproduced among GFIC, the Musicians Union of Ghana, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and Micky Shapiro. The films were, by every measure, unsuccessful, and Aryeetey was widely criticized for his decision to look abroad for coproducers and directors (Diawara 1992; Ukadike 1994).

      The production of two family dramas, Genesis Chapter X (1979) and Aya Minnow (1987), indicated a shift in the form and content of the national film company’s productions. These films rely exclusively on the conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema and move away from the incorporation of indigenous performance forms and the mixed modes of spectator engagement described previously.29 Here the narratives are focalized through individual characters and plots driven by private, family conflicts. Each of these films constructs closed story-worlds and, through the use of continuity editing, place spectators within this “hermetic universe on-screen” (Vasudevan 2001, 151). Both explore broken or failed nuclear families and detail the negative repercussions those failures have on children. In Genesis, Zaria Garba, who works as a doctor in England, travels back home to Ghana to find the mother he was taken from as a child. As the plot unravels, Zaria uncovers the truth of his past, that his mother, Hawa, had an adulterous affair with her current husband, Adamu, while she was married to Garba’s father. The affair lead to the murder of Zaria’s father, for which Hama was put in jail, and her then very young son, Zaria, was taken away. In the second feature, the death of Aya Minnow’s mother during her birth casts a long shadow on Aya’s life as portrayed in Aya Minnow. Controlled by an overprotective father, Aya fights to find love without her father’s interference, and only after he dies does she seem to have real hope for a happy life with Kobi.