How Ghana's Gory, Gaudy Movie Posters Became High Art

When Frank Armah began painting posters for Ghanaian movie theaters in the mid-1980s, he was given a clear mandate: Sell as many tickets as possible. If the movie was gory, the poster should be gorier (skulls, blood, skulls dripping blood). If it was sexy, make the poster sexier (breasts, lots of them, ideally at least watermelon-sized). And when in doubt, throw in a fish. Or don’t you remember the human-sized red fish lunging for James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me?

“The goal was to get people excited, curious, to make them want to see more,” he says. And if the movie they saw ended up surprisingly light on man-eating fish and giant breasts? So be it. “Often we hadn’t even seen the movies, so these posters were based on our imaginations,” he says. “Sometimes the poster ended up speaking louder than the movie.”

In fact, many of the posters painted by Armah and other Ghanaian artists in the 1980s and ’90s have gone on to achieve a fame almost entirely detached from the films they depicted. Today, they’re collectors’ items, hanging in art galleries in the U.S. and Europe and frequently retailing for upwards of $2,000 a pop. And the most successful of the artists—who once churned out dozens of images a year on razor-thin margins for local cinemas—now make their wares on demand for their cult following of international fans.

“World cinema is a lingua franca we all understand,” says Ernie Wolfe, a Los Angeles art dealer and collector who first noted the unusual artistry of Ghana’s cinema advertisements while traveling in the country in 1990. He now collects the posters. “These posters appeal to people because [they] invite this really incredible dialogue—a comparison between what you know of a film and how the painter imagined it. And they’re also just really good art.”

That, Wolfe says, is the kernel of the posters’ enduring mass appeal—they represent a sliver of cinema history that is now irretrievable, before the world-flattening effects of technology and globalization rendered it all but impossible to advertise a film in anything but the most literal terms. For nearly two decades in Ghana, the concepts behind the world’s most famous movies mixed freely with the imaginations of its most talented painters, creating a gaudy, gory, glittery tradition of pop art like none other in the world.

Resource: http://www.theatlantic.com