introduction 15a copy of something means being in contact with that something, even if
this contact is established only through sight or sound because looking at
something means “touching” it with the eyes, and listening to something,
“touching” it with the ears. In terms of film, Laura Marks (2000: xii) calls
this the “tactile and contagious quality of cinema.”
But what about the copies I explore in this book? Within the physical
and physiological chain of contact and copy just sketched, they seem to
multiply the processes involved, and turn out to be copies of copies of
copies of copies. Take, for example, a Nigerian video remake of an Indian
movie (chapter 4). The latter is a copy of physical reality, experienced
through a second copy produced within the sensory apparatus of the spec-
tator, who in our case is the producer or director of the remake. This spec-
tator now transforms his copy into physical reality again—that is, into
human action on a film set he directs (most likely mediated by a screen-
play or some other written plot). This action in turn is copied by a camera
onto a storage medium (most commonly digital tape), which if watched
by a spectator, produces yet another copy. This situation is further com-
plicated by the fact that the Indian original is most likely also a copy in
yet another sense, as Indian films are often adaptations of Indian mythol-
ogy. Apparently, the status of “original” has to be considered a relational
thing: an original is only so in relation to its copy, and not in any absolute
or ontological sense. Most originals thus turn out to be “original copies”
(Fehrmann et al. 2004: 8), which in fact depend on copies to lay claim
to their originality. “It is the copying that originates” (Geertz 1986: 380).
In terms of enabling encounters with “other possible lives,” this video
example harbors still another problem. The Indian “original copy” is based
on mimesis—showing actors acting as if they were others. Hence, Nige-
rian directors and their actors base their own copies on at least twice-
mediated representations of “other possible lives.” A very tempting short-
cut is to just ignore the complex process of mediation involved in either the
mimesis of the first or second degree, as is sometimes done in Nigeria and
elsewhere. In his book Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops, Brad Weiss
(2009: 169–196) discusses how young Tanzanian urbanites relate to Amer-
ican tv serials. According to Weiss, these audiences frame the American
soap opera as some sort of “live” show—not in the sense of a live broadcast
but in the sense of portraying the true lives of real people (in contrast to