The website producer of MovieTime has just finished telling me how film posters are one of the most underappreciated forms of art. In context to the now antiquated practice of DIY film posters in Sub-Saharan Africa, it appears this may be a true statement.
The Visual News recently posted an article on The Lost Art of the Ghana Movie Poster highlighting a few particularly awesome movie posters made by Ghanaian artists for contraband movie theatres. In this article the author writes:
“During the boom of the video cassette in the 1980s, small-scale mobile theaters popped up around the sub-saharan country, providing entertainment as they passed through towns and villages. The showings often took place in social clubs, houses or outside in the warm night air, and sometimes only consisted of chairs, a generator, VCR and a television. To promote these shows artists were employed to create large, colorful posters and given full creative license to attract the viewing public… often with very entertaining, but less than accurate results…Today, with much easier access to VHS, DVD and the internet, the mobile cinema has largely died out in the country, and with it the colorful posters that advertised the events.”
Collected from The Visual News and Flickr, here are some of the great Ghanaian movie posters. Thanks to Awesome Tapes From Africa for bringing the original post to my attention:
