Journal of Development Communication And Applied Theatre

The use of film to portray human situation is being widely accepted but much emphasis on its effectiveness in referent arrogation is yet to be optimally explored. This has made the need for cultural signs in the Nollywood subgenres like Ibibio films, their specific meaning and their reflective signified to the audience necessary and binding for critical evaluation. Premised on Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structuralism, this paper uses qualitative analytic method to analyse Ibibio cultural communication and the vividness of its signified(s) in Ifʌk. Findings show that cultural communication is the interchange of a people’s way of life through the available medium. Ibibio people express their in-depth ideas through oral form, making proverbs, idioms, adages and jokes tenable indigenous media for critical information. The human emotions such as pity, love, courage, disgust and viciousness are deployed to encode salient possible intent, indicating that the future of a society depends more on the nature of their education, purpose and the viability of the communicating codes. Findings further show that cultural values are coded in symbols and that experience is required to grasp the referent. The paper concludes that the incorporation of a people’s philosophical position and social values in embellish a film is one of the nascent means of exposing and promoting the values of those people and their society. It recommends that cultural ideas communicated through visual images should be made clearer to transcend the signified.

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