Ghana's Golden Age of Movie Posters

Shaq Steel, 1998 Babs (Ghanaian, 1975 - ) Oil on flour sack; 63 × 43 in. 2014.28.37 Gift of Jay and Helen Lavely

 New Lingua Franca

“World cinema is a lingua franca we all understand,” stated Ernie Wolfe, a Los Angeles based art dealer and collector of Ghanaian film posters in The Atlantic. Ghanaian movie posters are now considered art gallery-worthy in the U.S. and Europe, when their inception was modest and utilitarian. These rugged creations represent an era in the 80’s and 90’s when Ghana was absorbing American film culture immensely. Historically, these unique, hand-painted posters were created for commercial purposes, yet, they apparently possess more idiosyncrasies than the average film poster. This art practice was started by a group of resourceful Ghanaians in the mid-1980’s buying TV’s, VCR’s, and VHS tapes, traveling from town to town with the hope of making a sale.

Needing a quick and easy way to capture the attention of a burgeoning group of American film viewers in Ghana, these salesmen created campy, yet vividly-painted canvas posters for the audiences of Ghanaian cinema clubs. The posters were sewn together from two repurposed 50kg flour sacks. While the canvas was fairly durable with oil-based paints, constant transport in extreme West African climates meant that the posters tended not to endure for very long before falling into poor condition. This damage is most evident at the frayed corners of the poster shown above. The originally coarse material rapidly became as soft as a bedsheet from many years of everyday handling. Traditionally in Ghana, paintings covered three-dimensional surfaces such as pottery, shields, and even walls, but never rectangular portable cloth. This new brand of Ghanaian painting on two-dimensional surfaces seems to have a fairly recent and almost entirely commercial history.

Ghanaian painters like Frank Armah painted quintessential American action heroes like Rocky and The Terminator, but with even more camp and testosterone. Armah's commercial aim was to sell as many film tickets as possible for Ghanaian cinema houses—even when the depiction on the poster had little in common with the original plot of the film. The artists typically had never seen the films they were painting posters for, and instead based their works off of hearsay within their respective communities, or even used the film’s title as subject matter. Artistically delineating from the film’s narrative took precedence, and now it can be said that it worked in this cult movement’s favor.

The protagonists which occupy the majority of space on these posters are replaced by caricature-like representations of virile males, at times accompanied by overly sexualized female counterparts. As a result, art historians liken these film posters to circus sideshow banners signifying superhuman feats as opposed to their Hollywood equivalents. The most relevant comparison is offered by Ernie Wolfe, when he stated the posters are “neon signage without the benefit of electricity.” What should be negative spaces on the canvas tend to be filled with illustrations of natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions—when they most likely did not occur in the film. For example, the 1987 film Killer Instinct (later retitled Behind Enemy Lines) is certainly an action-packed film, but none of the film’s explosions are reminiscent of the volcanic eruption taking up the above the 1996 poster’s background.

At the end of the golden age of Ghanaian hand-painted poster production in 1996, a number of factors caused demand to stop, including new films being shipped over with respective posters and the introduction of personal household T.V. sets and VHS players in Africa.  In the final years, the posters had very little in common with their American predecessors, but the result was refreshing, hinting at a mockery of the superficial culture they were importing.