The Video Joker as a Performative Strategy in the Cinema of Wakaliwood

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the figure of the Video Joker, both semiotically and discursively, as it appears in Isaac Nabawna’s anti-illusory cinema. Video Jokers became popular in Ugandan cinema screenings at the end of the 20th century. Their function, at first, was to translate and explain imported North American action films, which were not economically affordable to dub or subtitle. However, they gradually became comic performers, capable of attracting audiences on their own. Nabwana’s films are characterized by the inclusion of a video joker’s off-screen commentary, attaching to the film text a figure traditionally linked to film exhibition as an event. By analyzing both the content of these comments and the figure as a trace of a performative encounter between subject and image, the research aims to demonstrate how this fixation provokes the emergence of a model of realism that is linked to a certain tradition of documentary film.