THE  SPIRITUAL  IMPACTS  OF HOME  MOVIES

Throughout the history of humanity, DRAMA has remained a very powerful and effective tool of communication .it is the celebration of life .

In its communication function ,it has always remained a reflection of events, a recapitulation and promotion of cultures ; an appraisal of socio-political climates , a critique of religions ,a comparison of characters [and temperaments] ,an x-raying mirror of family/domestic affairs ,a panorama showcasing trends of developments across the globe ,a critical tation of values as lived by people in different societies ,a call on people unto consciousness and involvement, a discussion of ideologies and philosophies ,and many more intentions and purpose behind the mind of the playwright which the directors labours to realize through the actors and actress.

In addition ,DRAMA/MOVIE equally [and in most cases] serves the purposes of recreation and relaxation, indeed entertainment incidentally, this is where most viewers stop ,so even when a piece of drama is loaded with any of these other life celebrating aspects, they are completely [or partly] relegated to the background ,This ,of course is as a result of lack of perspicacity and therefore of their uncritical involvement in watching the piece of drama or movies as it unfolds.

The situation is more serious in the case of the Nigerian home movies surging out from the movie industry and spreading out with the quickness of an epidemic to meet the already and daily increasing waiting consumers .Here ,only what meets the eye and the amount of entertainment derived are the only things that matters. Regarding this we observes that:

At times people are so carried by the entertaining dimension of  the movies they watch that the values ,lessons and messages the movie is meant to convey slip-off without being properly grasped”

1.To the necessary question as to what movies are, a practitioner explains thus: Movies are stories of human experience told with the aid of the moving images or pictures .Movie could focus their central theme on a sad human experience, or a happy event, or a mixture of the two ,or a neutral human experience ,or on a comic side of life .In all these ,the moviemaker is always at pains in bringing the message he intends to portray.

2.In purpose, DRAMA and MOVIE are the same thing except that in DRAMA what is performed  on stage is thereafter left at the mercy of human memory, while still existing in books that would ordinary take long hours and days to read. In movies, actions are technically loaded and permanently saved in microwave audio visual records that can be most comfortably kept in homes in hundreds and thousands and each viewed within a few hours.P .T Burns describes movies as …. A photographic projection of continous still images .In contrast to chronophotography ,it is a technical device for achieving the illusion of motion by photographic means .

3.At this point ,we need to add that the Nigeria Moviemaker is fully aware of the sway the sense of sight exercise on the people of our time ,load embellish their movie productions with an endless myriads of things that can most easily catch and entertain the eye in a spell of fantasies .The elaborate explanation of A .practitioners about this development cannot be overlooked.

More than ever before ,the people of our time are increasingly focusing their attention on what the sense of sight comprehends and delights in. the culture of listening and the field of acquisition of knowledge is being speedily replaced by the alluring culture of gazing ,of watching and of feeding the eyes with pictures and images ,For the people of our time too, what they see appeals and makes more meaning to them than what they now observes through any of the other four key external senses of cognition .One only needs to visit the cyber cafes and internet providing business centers town to get a blue print of how attractive knowledge can be when packaged and made accessible by mere gazing on the screen ,on the home scene ,the television –set gets people glued to it to the point of unconscious addition .

4.This situation holds out serious dangers not only for adults ,but more especially for youths and little children who in their undiscerning and unsuspecting disposition sit before the screen to feast their eyes [even side by side with their parents] for hours are unending .In this way a lot of injurious and deadly pills including pornography, sex culture ,immodest dressing ,gun shooting syndrome sagacious discussions and slangs[seeming] triumph fetishism ,the consultation of oracles and shrines and many more have unavoidably become the daily heavy doeses of little and uncritical ,however sometimes most defectively reflected in the Nigeria Home Movies.

Now ,in the name of church that ought to be the conscience of the evil society ,we stand out to show out unaffected solicitude in and through a spiritual touch to the whole situation ,a spiritual approach that must however remain necessarily critical to achieve its intended purpose .

Since it is true that there is more to life and more to every movie than what the eye can see ,what spiritual distilling methods /postures can we adopt and deeply apply to see that the values and lessons communicated in and through such movies would be actually be critically grasped and hence shield ourselves and our children form swallowing hook, line and sinker movies based on what meets the eye? Can anyone validly deny that the huge moral collapse in our children of today ,in homes and In schools is unconnected with what the eyes feeds into the mind via these movies ! What are we Christians doing using the same effective and strong tool of social communication ,[the movie outfit] to drive home Christian messages, lessons and values ? Can the Nigerian Home Movie Industry [NHMI] and the Church have any meeting point in collaborative mission ?

These and related questions informed by a sound Christian spiritual consciousness vis-à-vis the activities of the Nigerian Home Movie Industry must continue to agitate and challenge our minds as we continue to respond to this phenomenon in subsequent editions of this timely magazine.