Recreation of Oral Poetic Genres in Selected Yorùbá Home-Video Films

Abstract

The Yorùbá film as audio-visual literature is thought of as one of the most educative components building society. “Modernization” and responses to global change brought about the Yorùbá films which are an offshoot of the Yorùbá Travelling Theatre Movement. The indigenous theatre practitioners who are versatile in practicing the oral poetic genre and have successfully emerged as producers, directors and film-script writers employ and recreate oral poetic genres by adding feelings, beliefs and knowledge they had acquired in the past. This paper attempts a descriptive analysis of five purposively-selected Yorùbá video films by using the sociological approach: Ẹfúnsetán Aníwúrà; Basọ̀run Gáà, Ogun Àgbẹ́kọ̀ya, Ogun Ìdàhọ̀mì and Ọ̀rànmíyàn; which are replete with instances of ingenious recreations of Yorùbá oral poetic genres. The analysis is conducted with a view to elucidating the attempts of Yorùbá home-video scriptwriters in recreating and reconstructing their experiences. The analyses of the selected Yorùbá home-video films reveal that the Yorùbá home-video script writers make artistic use of Yorùbá oral genres in their films through the creative exploitation of proverbs, songs, chants and mythical allusions. The allusions to myths in the selected films suggest that Yorùbá home-video films share apparent inter-textual links with Yorùbá oral poetry. The study concludes that Yorùbá home-video scriptwriters deploy oral poetic genres in their films as one of the ways in which the artistic experiences of the Yorùbá people can resonate.