Hand-Painted Movie Posters can be Lucrative in the Internet Age Ghanaian movie posters spark interest as a standalone art form If you get an authentic poster from some 20 years ago, it will probably look way older. Although the posters were made pretty durable, the extensiveness of their usage made them appear older than they are. And all of them made the movies way gorier than they actually were. Every artist brought their own distinctive touch to each movie they had the task to promote. The artists, who often signed their posters as they would do with regular artwork, used that canvas to create cinematic, imagination-driven and hugely interpretive paintings. That kind of a DIY quality corresponded to the whole bootleg cinema phenomenon. They say that the perfect poster size would be made by sewing two canvas sacks together. Ghanaian movie posters are painted by hand, on a piece of canvas that's usually made out of flour sacks. Left: Alien vs Predator via Pinterest / Right: Friday the 13th via Scabyhorror Two Flour Sacks Make a Perfect Canvas It did, however, become a movement in contemporary Ghanaian art. They exhibited a vast attention to detail, and as a result of that, painting movie posters was never profitable. What makes them unique is the interpretation: while relying and using the known motifs from a movie, artists created their own artworks. They are a form of pop art, but they’re oddly authentic. They belong to contemporary African art and, at the same time, show us an art that had a chance to develop in a rather unique climate. The movie posters from Ghana combine several visual languages at once.
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Left: Alien via Thumbpress/ Right: Predator 2 via Monsterbrains Hand-Painted Movie Posters in the Lack of Printing Pressesīut, why hand painted posters in the age of VCRs and portable generators? During the seventies and the eighties Ghanaian laws forbade importation of large printing presses, so in Ghana it was a common thing to hand-paint everything – from posters to commercial sings and signage by the road. After all, the business had to be profitable (so the exaggeration was sometimes pretty excessive), and the practice of hand painting movie posters continued well into the 90s. The aim of the posters was to purposefully exaggerate, grab attention of potential viewers and set their expectations high. So bootleg cinemas had their own bootleg movie posters.
On their way, they hired local artists to paint the posters for those movies.
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Equipped with VCRs, diesel generators and larger TV sets or projectors of sorts, savvy businesspeople toured Ghana showing movies where they couldn’t be shown. Eventually, thanks to the rise in popularity of video cassette recorders, rural Ghana saw an emergence of mobile cinemas.
Some smaller towns and villages still didn’t even have the electricity, so setting up a movie theater was pretty impossible. Outside of major cities in Ghana, cinemas were rare. Left: I hate my village via Amusing Planet / Right: Desperate billionaire 2 via CVLTnation Cinemas Without Electricity Nigerian comedies also needed spooky hand-painted posters And while Hollywood ones tend to leave a lot to be desired, the Ghanaian versions bring you craft and unique approach that often has something to do with exaggeration, either through depictions graphic violence of purely associative compositions. Ever since the Hollywood colorists have discovered the omnipotent combination of orange and blue, every modern movie poster looks kind of similar and indistinguishable from dozens of others. The modern movie posters look boring anyway. Although hanging movie posters on your wall sounds like something we used to do in high school, having a movie poster from Ghana is something different. And you'll show them off more than you usually would do with a similar item. Come with us into the world of Ghanaian movie posters! Lately, they turned out to be all the rage and the perfect fit for thrill-seeking movie and art lovers.
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