The Extratextuals

I am now back from Malawi, where I’ve been for the last month. It was a fantastic trip. I’ll spare you the long, rambling travelogue here, instead focusing on Malawian media consumption. I’m aiming to write three descriptive posts, on film, on television, and on music, and a fourth post with reflections and analysis.

Just to situate things a bit, though, this is drawn on observations from myself and from my research assistant. I was in one town (Liwonde) in the South for two weeks, with small visits to Balaka, Mangochi, and Monkey Bay, then in another town (Rumphi) in the North for another two weeks. I hired my research assistant, Stanslous Ngwire, in Rumphi, and hired him for a month of visiting video shows (more on these below), places where television is played, and CD/DVD stores/stalls, and to conduct, translate, and transcribe interviews in English, Chichewa, or Chitumbuka (the first two being Malawi’s national languages, the third the main language in the North). Stanslous has experience interviewing and is a marvel. But I also chatted a heck of a lot with many people: Malawians are some of the warmest people I’ve met on the planet, and anytime I walked anywhere, I would often end up with someone accompanying me on an ad hoc basis, simply to chat. That said, I’ve yet to really dig into the interviews yet, so these are rudimentary observations. And they’re not based on years in Malawi, so take everything with a grain of salt, yeah?

FILM

Movies in Malawi are seen either via satellite, or in “video shows.” Both usually involve small televisions (ie: if you’d consider it for the foot of the bath, that’s the one). The video shows are usually in a one-room mud-brick building with a few plastic crates or planks of wood for the adults to sit on, and a piece of cardboard for the kids. A few that I went into shared the space with a rat or two, and with the occasional hornet or wasp nest. They usually house around 20 to 30 viewers at any given time. Admission is either 5 or 10 kwacha (3.5 or 7 cents). Usually, “show times” are outside, with a makeshift piece of cardboard telling you the times and the DVD or VCD covers telling you what’s on. You pay to walk in, not for the show, and I found it rare for people to arrive dutifully on time, instead walking in or out as time commitments or interest dictated. Malawi only has five films of its own (I’ve yet to confirm this, but about 6 people gave me this number independently), so almost all movies were American or Nigerian, in English (English is widely spoken in Malawi, though not at an advanced level). English subtitles were usually left on, which helps because the sound systems are pretty awful and cranked up to the point of creating audio crackle. People tended to watch observantly, the quiet in the room interrupted only by occasional comments, by kids coming in to sell snacks such as beans or sugar cane, or when the funny-looking azungu (white person) entered the room, becoming cause for intense amusement and curiosity.

What was on? For American movies, almost exclusively action films (though I’m told that Zomba, the university town, has a video show or two that play the detective and spy dramas/thrillers that the students are supposed to enjoy). Also, almost everything was old.  A few titles include Shoot Fighter, Street Fighter, First Blood, Con Air, Terminator 2, Game of Death, The Return of Swamp Thing, Predator, Red Heat, The Last Hunter, and Barbarian. Jean Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Bruce Lee, and Arnold Schwarzenegger featured prominently, sometimes even painted on the side of the building. All of the films were pirated, and often took the form of coming in a package with several films. Most such packages were grouped by stars, as star culture is clearly central to viewing. Other names included Wesley Snipes, Nicholas Cage, Bruce Willis, and Tom Cruise. Snipes’s addition to this A list reflects the interest in African-American stars and culture, as movies with white stars and African-American settings featured especially prominently, and as the occasional drama snuck into the mix when featuring an African-American star such as Denzel Washington.

And for the only exception to the American-Nigerian monopoly on eyeballs, plenty of kungfu films were there too.

Overall, though, it was an old collection of films: I never saw a film made after 2000 either playing or advertised as on deck for the day. When I spoke to Malawians, some were quite shocked to hear that Van Damme, Seagal, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone aren’t big stars any more.

The Nigerian stuff tended to feature stories about love, betrayal, witchcraft, and dancing. Acting was usually horrendous, as with all production qualities (in my audience research, many told my research assistant that the shows actually hurt their eyes … and I’m glad I’m not the only one). But for this reason, they had great camp value to me. One, for instance, followed the story of a woman trying to get another woman’s man by any means. First she commissions a witch doctor to poison the woman, to no avail, and so she then asks a bad guy called Bubs to knock her off. When characters go to dance (in deus ex machina style, no less: Bubs, for instance, spuriously demands that they go dancing before he kills the woman), there is often traditional African dancing, or at least hybrid dance styles. There are also long drawn out scenes (well, all the scenes are long and drawn out. I hear that David Bordwell loves films with long shot length, so he’d looooove these) of familial discussions about love. Titles are campy too, such as Lover’s Revenge 5, and King of All Virgins.

Whereas the American action films get a lot of laughing and so forth, the audience is often more reflectively involved in these films (my audience research suggesting at the moment that some Malawians regard them as significantly closer to lived experience, and thus, despite their poor quality, they may be a little more “useful”).

The video shows I attended were frequented only by men, though my research assistant insists that some welcome women too. Malawian women do a heck of a lot of work, mind you, so leisure time for Malawian women isn’t all that common. Also, since some video shows double as “bottle stores” (pubs), or are seen in a similar light, women’s attendance can cast doubt on their values. Clearly, then, movie-watching is more easily a male activity. Within that context, though, the range of viewed material is rather bipolar by American gender standards: hyper-masculine, violent, beat- or -shoot-em-ups on one hand, and hyper-feminized soaps on the other. None of my respondents suggested that watching love stories was “only for girls” or anything like that, suggesting the degree to which the gendering of melodrama is quite culturally specific.

Finally, DVD sales more or less echoed what was playing in the video shows, with American action films, Nigerian love stories, and kungfu flicks filling most of the shelf-space. However, South African films made a bit of an incursion into the market (as they did on television), with a few South African comedies being added to the mix. And foreign films from any nation set in and about Africa broke the action-or-love story hegemony, with The Gods Must Be Crazy and Hotel Rwanda both capturing my eye in a few stores and stalls.

Next up … television

Malawi, stars film watching, Malawi, video shows