Ephemera Assemblyman's excellent blog has collated some fine examples of movie posters created by artists in Ghana to promote touring features. The artists involved sometimes only had a verbal explanation of the films content to work which often lead to some truly interesting interpretations.
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In the 1980s video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema†operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the people to see.__In order to promote these showings, artists were hired to paint large posters of the films (usually on used canvas flour sacks). The artists were given the artistic freedom to paint the posters as they desired - often adding elements that weren’t in the actual films, or without even having seen the movies. When the posters were finished they were rolled up and taken on the road (note the heavy damages). The “mobile cinema†began to decline in the mid-nineties due to greater availability of television and video; as a result the painted film posters were substituted for less interesting/artistic posters produced on photocopied paper.__The artistic freedom that these artists were given allowed for the creation of some very interesting and sometimes bizarre posters that, as screenwriter Walter Hill wrote, were quite often “more interesting than the films.â€
Info and some images from Ephemera Assemblyman’s
