(7s) Artists Wanted #3 - Ghana Movie Club Posters

It was Raw Visions magazine that first hipped me to this entire phenomenon, which I then had Noelle at the local library get the book that article culled from inter-library loaned to me so I could scope it out fully for two months, the book being called Extreme Canvas, and being a collection hodgepodged together by one obsessive compulsive dude back in the day. The story is in Ghana, there weren't movie theater, but when VCRs spread the world, movie clubs popped up that had bench seats at best, and you could pay to go watch a VCR movie play on a TV in the front of the room, kind of like every American school kid did at that time in school, except it was a big entertainment treat in Ghana. And for advertising movies, the clubs would have people use old flour or food sacks and paint images from the movie with the title on the sacks to hang outside the movie clubs so people knew what was playing. The many aspects of this that made it wacky was, many of the movies were not just Hollywood releases, but coming from next-door Nigeria's burgeoning movie industry, now infamously known as Nollywood. The movies from there are way out, with tribal demons and all sorts of monstrosities of interpersonal dealings as well as paranormal beings. This makes for pretty graphic potato sack painting posters, when you have a man's baldhead with fangs and the body of a snake wrapped around a crying baby. On top of this already wild subject matter is the fact that the people who painted the posters oftentimes knew nothing about the movie, other than the title, and the explanation on the box the movie came in. These posters no longer exist in Ghana really, as DVD players are cheap and abundant and made movie clubs obsolete. (Remember how VHS movies were like $60 each? That's crazy to think about now.) So most of these posters in existence are already in the collections of oddball freaks like myself, so I'm sure ever being able to buy one wouldn't be the easiest process. But they are some amazing looking things, and the perfect example of how the entire process makes something art as much as the artist does. Ghana is this strange west African country where tribal religions still blend together with major international ones, and movies became social gatherings, but in a poor Third World country, food sacks and leftover house paints were used to make these movie club ads, which ended up being bizarrely colorful and graphic and a one-of-a-kind cultural phenomenon on the earth ball. And now fucking dork ass whiteboys like myself are like, "Oooooh! I wish I could have one!"