Ghanaian film posters and viewing cultures

The posters are tied to the Ghanaian and Nollywood film industries that emerged in the late 1980s.

The exhibition, “Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture,” features hand-painted Ghanaian film posters made by Ghanaian artists in the late 1980s to mid-1990s advertising Hollywood, Kung Fu, Bollywood, Nollywood, and Ghanaian films.

This was commercial art for urban film houses and theaters that consisted of a television, a VCR, and a gas generator that traveled from town to town in a latter day mobile cinema. The posters were painted with oil and acrylic paints on large flour sacks and traveled too. Young boys often carried the posters around with a bell and announced the evening’s show (according to Indiana University African Studies Program director, Samuel Obeng, who spoke at the recent opening of the exhibition on the university’s campus in Bloomington, Indiana) offering an auditory component to the already compelling visual one. But as VCRs and TVs became more affordable to the average consumer, the theaters and poster painting  associated with them disappeared.

I first saw this exhibit in Chicago where it was called Movie Mojo and the owner of the Chicago gallery that holds this collection, Glen Joffe, is preparing a book by the same title. There are other collections and a similar exhibit ran in Munich, Germany:

If you know these posters you may have seen Ernie Wolfe’s out of print book Extreme Canvas that also documents the phenomenon.

The posters are tied to the Ghanaian and Nollywood film industries that emerged in the late 1980s. Akin Adesokan, Carmela Garritano and Jonathan Haynes have done pioneering academic work on these industries, so check out their studies to learn what the intersection of the IMF, new technologies, economic crisis, novel aesthetics, and entrepreneurial innovation in tough times meant for West African film practice.

As Garritano points out, these videos, at least initially, pitted the new aesthetics of economically squeezed urban masses against the conservative, authenticist standards of a dispossessed, nationalist intelligentsia. Birgit Meyer points to the ways that Pentecostal religion’s emphasis on the visual facilitates its adoption of video film media. I think the posters have a static force that amplifies this effect.

While I once wondered — and there was some professorial grumbling about this at the exhibit opening — whether these posters feed negative stereotypes of the continent, I actually think just the opposite. As Glen Joffe put it in his gallery talk, these posters “win the war of engagement.” They are compelling as pieces of advertising cum art and as pieces of popular culture. They draw people in who might otherwise not ever have been interested or imagined that Africans watch B-flicks and Kung Fu movies like young Americans do. And hopefully they will get people to ask more questions about Ghanaian visual artists, Ghanaian film, and history and media. If comments on blog sites that show the posters are any evidence, some folks are now looking at Ghanaian and Nigerian films thanks to the poster paintings.

  • This post falls under the category of Shameless Self-Promotion since Betsy Stirratt, Director of the Grunwald Gallery, Jeremy Sweet, associate Director of the Grunwald, and I brought this to Indiana University under the rubric of the 2012 Themester – Good Behavior, Bad Behavior. With many thanks to Nathan Donnelly for his photos of the exhibit opening.

Further Reading

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Cinematic universality

Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.

The meanings of Heath Streak

Zimbabwean cricketing legend Heath Streak’s career mirrors many of the unresolved tensions of race and class in Zimbabwe. Yet few white Zimbabwean sporting figures are able to stir interest and conversation across the nation’s many divides.

Victorious

After winning Italy’s Serie A with Napoli, Victor Osimhen has cemented his claim to being Africa’s biggest footballing icon. But is the trend of individual stardom good for sports and politics?

The magic man

Chris Blackwell’s long-awaited autobiography shows him as a romantic rogue; a risk taker whose life compass has been an open mind and gift to hear and see slightly into the future.

How to think about colonialism

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

More than just a flag

South Africa’s apartheid flag has been declared hate speech by a top court. But while courts are important and their judgments matter, racism is a long and internationally entrenched social phenomenon that cannot be undone via judicial processes.

Resistance is a continuous endeavor

For more than 75 years, Palestinians have organized for a liberated future. Today, as resistance against Israeli apartheid intensifies, unity and revolutionary optimism has become the main infrastructure of struggle.

Paradise forgotten

While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.