Conflicting Framings of Women in Nollywood Videos

As men have traditionally been in power in the film industry, Theorists believe that the camera shows us the world through the stereotype eyes of the „male gaze ‟ (Lovey 2004). The representations of women in Nollywood videos fail to depict them in ways which evaluate the sordid reality of things in the real world. To achieve this false representation, the filmmakers have resorted to reversal in roles of women and men in the society. The implication of such misconstructions is that women are made to be seen and read in both the films and in real life as outlaws and evil to their families and society as a whole. This paper aims at outlining and critically analysing the role of women in Nigerian videos using two Nigerian videos Omata Women (2003) and More than a Woman (2004) to interrogate how Nollywood videos thrive on conflicting framings of women in ways which lead to understanding how the videos reproduce societal fears and anxieties that are borne out of patriarchy and the filmmakers ‟ bias