AN ANATOMY OF VISUAL NARRATIVE IN TUNDE KELANI’S MAAMI AND ABENI FILMS

Abstract

Visual narrative is one of the key perspectives in the appreciation of filmmakers and their works. Tunde Kelani films have attracted critical attention from various disciplinary standpoints, specifically, in the areas of content description, thematic preoccupation and production quality. However, little attention is paid to his visual narratives. A structural analysis of Tunde Kelani’s films was conducted with a view to determining his visual narrative style.

Bordwell and Thompson’s formalist theory, which is concerned with form as an internal system governing the relations among filmic elements, was adopted. Two Tunde Kelani films, namely Maami and Abeni, were purposively selected for this qualitative study due to their unique visual narrative forms. Four formalist principles on visual narrative (opening and closing, story and plot, causality and character identification) were utilised in analysing the films.

Maami and Abeni use in medias res and prologue style of opening to activate spectators’ interest. The closure preference for Maami is an open-ended narrative, while a close-ended narrative is used in Abeni. Each storyline in Maami and Abeni combines both the diegetic elements of the presented events and the inferred events. The plots of these films, on the other hand, combine both the presented events and the non-diegetic elements. Human beings are used in both Maami and Abeni as primary and secondary agents of causality. Both Maami and Abeni feature temporal order, frequency and duration. The duration is further divided into plot, story, and screen durations. The spatial factors featured in both Maami and Abeni include story, plot and screen spaces. A mixed method of autobiography, anachronism and stream of consciousness is utilised in Maami, while in Abeni an eye of God presentational model is deployed. Maami is presented as a film with restricted range of information, in a mystery narrative prototype based on a goal oriented story format, while Abeni is presented with unrestricted range of information, a family narrative prototype based on a change of knowledge story format. Fade in transition mode is emploted in revealing information about some characters and in increasing the level of viewers’ identification with such characters in Maami, while Abeni deploys mostly objective depth of story to plot information in unveiling events.

The application of formalist principles presents an objective way of analysing visual narrative structure and effectively captures its dynamics in Tunde Kelani films. It is, therefore, recommended for objective analysis of more Nigerian films