The video display apparatus has a light modulation device for forming a picture in accordance with a video signal and a lighting unit for irradiating, on the light modulation device, illumination light necessary to cause it to display the picture. In the apparatus, the lighting unit irradiates the illumination light in sequence of individual plural illumination light source partitive areas, a luminance distribution calculating unit calculates luminance distributions of video signals corresponding to the plural partitive areas to determine illumination light luminance levels of the individual partitive areas, an illumination controller controls rays of the illumination light of individual areas of the lighting unit on the basis of determination by the luminance distribution calculating unit, and a video corrector corrects the video signal inputted to the light modulation device on the basis of the determination by the luminance distribution calculating unit.