Ghana's Hand-Painted Movie Posters: When Flour Sacks Became Cinema Art

The poster shows a giant snake with blood dripping from its fangs, wrapped around a screaming woman. Behind them, a man in sunglasses fires two guns at once while a helicopter explodes. The film is supposedly a gentle romantic comedy. Nobody in the village minds. The poster has done its job: by evening, every bench in the hall is full.

This is the world of Ghana's hand-painted movie posters, one of the most exciting and unexpected art forms to come out of Africa in the late twentieth century.

Cinema on the move

In the 1980s, Ghana was going through hard times. Imported goods were scarce, and printing presses were expensive and difficult to bring in. But a new technology was spreading: the VHS video cassette.

Enterprising young men set up mobile video clubs. They loaded a television, a video player and a petrol generator into a van and toured towns and villages, showing films in community halls, schoolrooms or simply under the stars. Audiences paid a small fee at the door. The films came from everywhere: Hollywood action movies, Hong Kong kung fu, Indian Bollywood musicals and, increasingly, Ghanaian and Nigerian productions.

Each club needed a way to tell people what was showing. Printed posters were rare and costly, so the operators turned to local sign painters.

Painted on flour sacks

The painters worked on what was cheap and strong: empty flour sacks, opened up and sewn together into a large canvas. They used oil or house paint, often bright and thick. A finished poster might be more than a metre tall, and it could be rolled up and carried from town to town, then pinned to a wall or a tree outside the screening.

A single poster could take an artist several days. Among the painters whose names became known were Joe Mensah, Alex Boateng, Stoger, Gilbert Forson and D.A. Jasper, many of them working out of small studios in Ghana's towns and cities. Their signatures, and the names of the video clubs, often appear proudly at the bottom of the canvas.

A style all its own

What makes these posters unforgettable is how far they go beyond the films they advertise.

• Exaggeration. Heroes have huge muscles. Monsters are bigger, guns more numerous and blood more plentiful than in the actual film.
• The supernatural. Ghosts, witches, giant snakes, spirits and demons appear even when the story has none. The painters knew their audiences were drawn to tales of hidden spiritual power, which was also a favourite theme of Ghanaian and Nigerian films of the time.
• Creative guesswork. Painters often had not seen the film. They might have only a title, a video box or a quick description. So they imagined. A poster for a dinosaur film might show creatures no scientist had ever named.
• Bold lettering. Titles are painted in large, hand-drawn letters, sometimes with spelling that went its own way.

Scholars such as the religious studies expert Birgit Meyer have pointed out that the posters tell us a great deal about how Ghanaians watched foreign films: not as passive viewers, but by reshaping Hollywood stories through their own fears, hopes and beliefs.

When the vans stopped coming

By the late 1990s, cheap printing had arrived and video halls began using printed posters and chalkboards. Then DVDs, satellite television and later the internet changed how people watched films. The hand-painted poster seemed to have had its day.

At the same time, foreign collectors were discovering them. Old posters that had hung in the rain outside village halls were bought and shipped abroad. Books were published, and exhibitions toured museums and galleries in the United States, Europe and Australia. Original posters from the 1980s now sell for thousands of dollars.

That success raises an uncomfortable question. Some of the original painters struggled to make a living after the video club era ended, while their old work was sold for high prices far away. Some artists have since found a new market, painting fresh posters on commission for collectors and tourists. Others moved on to different work entirely.

A cousin of other Ghanaian pop art

The movie posters belong to a lively Ghanaian tradition of artists who take an everyday job and turn it into something extraordinary. The same playful spirit appears in the fantasy coffins of the Ga people, carved in the shape of fish, cars or soft-drink bottles, and in the painted shop signs and barbers' boards that once filled Ghana's streets. Similar popular art forms grew up elsewhere on the continent, like Senegal's glass paintings and Mali's studio photography.

Why it matters

The hand-painted posters are a perfect example of African creativity under pressure. With little money, limited materials and no formal art schools behind them, Ghanaian painters invented a style that was loud, inventive and completely their own. They did not just advertise foreign films. They translated them into Ghanaian imagination, and in doing so they made something more memorable than many of the films themselves.

Further reading

• JSTOR Daily — How Ghanaian Artists Infused Hollywood with Spirituality
• Hyperallergic — Dazzlingly Morbid, Hand-Painted Film Posters from 1980s Ghana (2019)
• Ernie Wolfe III, Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana (Dilettante Press, 2000)