NIGERIAN VIDEO FILMS AND THE IMAGE QUESTION

Abstract

Since its emergence in the early 1990s and the attendant flurry of productions, the Nigerian Home Video Industry has been serving the multipurpose functions of reflecting the social realities, promoting and preserving of the different cultures that make up the entity called Nigeria. This is exemplified in Yoruba Home Videos from the Lagos-Ibadan axis, the English versions from the Onitsha-Enugu-Aba axis and the Hausa versions from the Kano-Jos axis. Their major advantage is their ease of accessibility to the different linguistic strata of the society. This explains why the video appears to have relegated the stage, television and celluloid to the background. This accessibility is further strengthened with the advent of cable television readily available to subscribers. It is against this background that this paper examines how this popular media can be harnessed for image making, in a more effective way than the expensive government sloganeering, which seems to have made minimal impact.