The Evolution of the Hand-Painted Movie Posters of Ghana
During the 1970s, the British movie houses of Ghana—once the province of newsreels, war propaganda, and the occasional “educational” film produced by the Colonial Film Unit in London—exploded in a kaleidoscope of world cinema.
“Tastes in Ghana have always been much more eclectic than here in the United States,” says Brian Chankin, owner of one of North America’s last great video stores—the volunteer-run Odd Obsession in Chicago. “American action and horror were always huge, regardless of budget, as were Kung Fu films from Hong Kong, Hindi movies from India—Bollywood. And more straight forward dramas, mostly from Nigeria and Ghana—Nollywood, Ghallywood. Of course, West African supernatural horror…”
“The RomCom did not come to Ghana,” clarifies Ernie Wolfe III, longtime West Los Angeles’ gallery-owner and author of 2000’s seminal artbook Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana. “They like action!”
Wolfe, who first went to Africa in 1973 while working as a photographer and diver for a safari company, describes early movie-going in Africa as a participatory sport—with people singing, dancing, interacting, eating, and fake-fighting in the aisles—no matter what the genre.
“A bit like what happens at The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” says Wolfe.
In Ghana, while the cinematic menu was delightfully omnivorous, there were not nearly enough screens to satisfy the locals. This was particularly true in rural areas where only the occasional informational film had been brought by the colonial government on a green-and-yellow Bedford bus.
The arrival of video changed everything.
Between 1985 and 1999, Ghanaian mobile cinema, a homespun industry comprised of quick-thinking entrepreneurs and fiercely competitive video clubs, took over the landscape. Equipped with a television, a VCR, and a portable generator, these clubs could load a truck and pop up in a village that was off the electrical grid. To advertise their arrival and entice crowds, movie posters were hung along the road. Unlike nearby Nigeria, whose fast-growing film industry had access to printing presses, Ghanaians were forced to improvise, giving rise to an unintentional art movement of bootlegged movie posters that has outlasted both the technology that initiated it and the industry that paid for it.
Originally hand-painted on flour sacks by professional sign painters, each Ghanaian movie poster was attached to a particular video cassette on the circuit. Much like traveling sideshow banners during the 1800s, these posters stood up well against weather and could be rolled up for use again and again. Also, like American sideshow banners, they invoked a visceral reaction that promised much more than they would deliver. And competition was fierce.
(Above: A gun toting Prince depicted in this interesting take on Purple Rain and Apollonia from this commissioned poster by Heavy J. Photo courtesy of Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery.)
like American sideshow banners, they invoked a visceral reaction that promised much more than they would deliver. And competition was fierce.
(Left: artist Heavy J poses with his rendition of The Fly. Photo courtesy Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery. Right: poster artist Leonardo posing with his work. Photo courtesy of Brian Chankin.)
Writhing with biceps, snakes, breasts, blood, gore, mutants, monsters, murderous trees, skeletons, witches, nuns, vampires, spiders, aliens, ninjas, and flesh-eating kittens, thousands of these posters moved through Ghana, a country half the size of California. The video clubs made money, and poster artists like Joe Mensah, D.A. Jasper, Leonardo, and Mr. Brew made names for themselves by signing their canvases and letting their imagination, more than any film synopsis, be their guide.
Upon discovering these astonishing and often confounding visual bootlegs, Wolfe devoted nearly ten years to gathering materials for the two books he has since published on the “Golden Age of Ghana’s Hand-Painted Movie Posters.” Some of the images are hilarious (Cujo depicted as a sad-eyed Bassett Hound with bloody lips). Others are extraordinary, as in the water-like ripples of Jackie Chan’s musculature in Stoger’s rendering of Who Am I). Many of them can only be described as weirdness (Leonardo’s depiction of the babysitter Jenny Seagrove in The Guardian as a woman with razor-sharp teeth, fleshy tree limbs, a belt of bloody baby heads, and a ten-foot long demonic tongue that dismembers bodies).
“Oh, the cruelty of trees,” chuckles Wolfe.
Wolfe, who was already given the Smithsonian the first U.S. exhibit of non-figurative, utility-based African art in 1979, had intended to write a book about fantasy coffins, a uniquely Ghanaian art form originated by master artisan Seth Kain Kwei. In his workshop, common wood caskets were transformed into high-detailed, vividly colored, custom-tailored sarcophagi in the shape of fishing boats, machine guns, peacocks, cows, catfish, pineapples, talking drums, bottles of Tuborg, or Volkswagen minibuses.
“D.A. Jasper was responsible for painting the coffin exteriors,” says Wolfe still in awe of the skill. “But all he really wanted to talk about were these other paintings he was doing. On canvas. I immediately thought, uh-oh, some European has fouled the waters, here…”
Quite quickly, though, Wolfe realized he had stumbled on to a homegrown art movement, and the new focus of his life.
“The [posters] were all far more beautiful and far more detailed than they needed to be to fulfill their function,” explains Wolfe. “That gives me a pretty broad definition of art but that’s it, that’s how I knew.”
Roy Sieber, associate director for collections and research at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, certainly agreed—he contributed a substantial essay to Extreme Canvas before his death in 2001. To be sure, though, art collectors and academics in the West are not the only ones to recognize the significance of Ghana’s “Golden Age” movie posters.
Writhing with biceps, snakes, breasts, blood, gore, mutants, monsters, murderous trees, skeletons, witches, nuns, vampires, spiders, aliens, ninjas, and flesh-eating kittens, thousands of these posters moved through Ghana, a country half the size of California.
(Above: Aliens movie poster with a winged Giger Xenomorph. Photo courtesy of Ernie Wolfe. From the book Extreme Canvas, Death Wish 4 becomes a monster movie in this hand-painted poster. Photo courtesy Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery, Jurassic Park poster depicting a “bonus scene” not shown in the movie. Photo courtesy Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World gets the Ghana poster treatment. Photo courtesy of Brian Chankin, Leonardo’s Cujo poster seems kind of adorable in this poster. Photo courtesy Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery,)
When Dr. Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, a cultural anthropologist at Ashesi University in Accra, discovered that the owner of a one-man video store in Odorkor was shutting down to go into refrigeration repair, he bought every poster in stock. The bulk of them, which were rented to clubs along with a video, became part of the permanent collection of the Center for African Popular Culture which Frimpong established at Ashesi University.
“I will say the acquisition was both for professional purposes and for nostalgic reasons,” he explains with cool academic precision, declining to say exactly how many posters are in his personal collection.
But, for thirty-six-year-old Robert Kofi Ghartey, there is no academic remove. The posters have shaped him, and the artform is still deliciously alive and still evolving.
“I have lived, been interested, and known the hand-painted movie posters almost all my life,” he says.
Hailing from the small, coastal town of Winneba, Ghartey now runs Ghana Origin Art Gallery in Accra. But, back in the ’80s, he was a poster boy.
“We were responsible for advertising; two of us carried the poster on a wooden board, hand in hand, around the town with a bell to create awareness for the venue. (We also did it to have free entrance to watch the movies that night.)”
We were responsible for advertising; two of us carried the poster on a wooden board, hand in hand, around the town with a bell.
Currently, Ghartey works closely with seven poster artists—among them Stoger, Heavy J., Salvation, and Farkira—all of whom began working for the video clubs in the mid ‘90s (and occasionally the great Leonardo, who began in 1986). All are still making movie posters, most often at the appeal of Brian Chankin. Just as they once painted the names of video clubs like Zaap, Pal Mal, Princess OSU, and Sly Fox they now include Odd Obsession Video Club, as if Chankin might be drawing a crowd. And they were not wrong.
Fueled by sheer unbridled aesthetic glee, Chankin began his hunt for original movie posters from Ghana as soon as he discovered Wolfe’s Extreme Canvas and Thibaut de Ruyter’s 2009 book Ghanavision. He found Ghartey buried deep in the nether pages of the World Wide Web and received about twelve original posters to hang in Odd Obsession. Chankin wasted little time requesting new work.
“I didn’t know if the artists were even still working,” says Chankin, “or if Kofi knew them, or if they would do it, but I asked for all five Death Wish movies—I’m a big Charles Bronson fan—you know, the first two movies are good, but the other three are pretty bad.”
No doubt, it is this sort of appreciation for the maligned, misbegotten, and nearly forgotten that has fueled the rising popularity of Ghana’s movie posters, particularly among cult movie enthusiasts, and their low-brow, art-lovin’ kin. Soon, other commissions began rolling in and Deadly Prey Gallery (named for a low-budget mercenary movie beloved by both Ghartey and Chankin) was born. The collection of eight hundred posters—both old and new—currently resides in the studio adjoining Chankin’s apartment, much to his eternal delight.
Eric Bresler, Director of the Philadelphia
Mausoleum of Contemporary Art, which is home to both the Cinedelphia Film Festival and the local iteration of the Psychotronic Film Society, has hosted three exhibits of work from Deadly Prey, the last one comprised entirely of original African movie title posters. While Bresler has a personal predilection for the road-worn authenticity and style of the original posters, especially those of Mr. Brew, he also recently commissioned an Eraserhead for the PhilaMOCA.
“There is a tension typical in any realm of collecting,” says Bresler, “[between] those who were there first, versus newcomers—authenticity versus imitation. Within the art world the originals would, of course, be considered more valuable than the new commissions since they have that authenticity… [but] it’s really a matter of personal preference. I don’t differentiate between the two time periods, though I do in other aspects of poster collecting.”
The patrons of PhilaMOCA are a receptive and enthusiastic audience for both eras of work, but Bresler says its groups like Everything Is Terrible!—a video blogging site which commissioned an original Jerry Maguire to accompany the world’s largest collection of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes—that really make the internet sit up and click.
For a historian and dealer like Wolfe, who still works with many first-generation poster artists, such commissions are anathema—they devalue the artform. Stripped of utility and made for Western eyes, he insists, the work loses its tension, inventiveness, and fearless abandon.
Stoger must disagree: “I do it all the same, whether it is for a cinema or for a collector.” Yet, he admits to a wistful longing for the Golden Age, and the notoriety it brought him in his own country.
“When we worked for the cinemas we had the chance to see our works going around the country,” says Stoger. “Collectors, they buy only one and you don’t see the [poster or the buyer] again.”
Except, perhaps, on the internet, where the commissions definitely have legs.
Heavy J.’s vivid interpretation of Ghost World—with the Seymour character (played by Steve Buscemi in the movie) wielding a double-barreled shotgun; Doug holding a grenade; and Enid holding Doug’s disembodied head—caught the attention of graphic novel author Daniel Clowes, as well as film director Terry Zwigoff, which, in turn, led to R. Crumb’s deep appreciation of Heavy J.’s valiantly proportioned poster Cramb. Leonardo’s Mrs. Doubtfire, which depicts the title character stabbing Pierce Brosnan through the eye with a broom handle while Robin Williams holds her shoe, made the rounds and helped us all laugh a little through the tears.
Recently, Chankin had a Nigerian movie poster design by Leonardo tattooed on his body, just the latest addition by a growing number of poster-loving tattoo artists. One tattoo is even signed Mr. Brew, a nod to the many forged signatures Chankin has discovered.
“I’m constantly searching for information on Mr. Brew,” says Chankin. Once described as the Jackson Pollock of Ghanaian poster art, Mr. Brew is notorious among collectors for getting drunk and painting, while still achieving zeniths in the genre—such as his Predator mash-up featuring the three-breasted mutant from Total Recall and Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role from The Terminator. “He’s been missing for eight years or so, but we have a book on him coming out on Featherproof in 2019. It will be the first monograph on a single Ghanaian movie-poster artist.”
We can’t wait.
(Below: Mrs. Doubtfire gets revenge in this interesting interpretation of the Robin Williams comedy, photo courtesy Brian Chankin and Deadly Prey Gallery, Twin Peaks poster (with very scary Log Lady log), a very horrifiying interpretation of The Gaurdian, photo courtesy of Ernie Wolfe Gallery. From the book Extreme Canvas 2.)
This Articled first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 50 from 2019, which is sold out. You can get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here. Your support in our independent publication is appreciated and crucial to us. Thanks for reading!
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