Retro Ghana Movie Art hits the big time in imagination and reach

I’ve always been amazed/intrigued/amused by the roadside posters in Ghana. These enterprising artists advertise their work with the most kitsch drawings… It’s not uncommon to see a slightly asymmetrical Osama Bin Laden, raising a toast (with a local Star Beer in hand), to George Bush and Kenny Rogers… all portrayed in oil colours on the canvas of a 6 foot plywood board…

I also discovered a few years ago, during my work with artisans in Ghana, that the typical barbershop signs, made by these same artists, had become quite popular in some art circles in the USA and Europe.
I even bought my son one when we redecorated his room, but having grown up in Accra for the majority of his life, he didn’t appreciate the kitsch factor and thought it stupid to pluck a badly drawn painting of three guys with various geometric hair designs up on his wall… so the idea was scrapped… but I digress. These paintings can be found online, selling for between $200-$400 each!!

Today I learned another industry has embraced the art of our beloved Ghanaian roadside painters… the movie industry! Look out Hollywood – here comes vintage Ghanaian movie posters – advertising so much more than the original film intended… The history as explained in my source site:

“In the 1980s “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana traveled from town to town creating temporary cinemas by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the public.

Artists were hired to paint large posters of the films for promotion, and 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. 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.”

On this great art appreciation blog, I found an article that explained the history of the posters, and when I looked further I found many sites that have been selling these unique bits of Ghanaian 80’s popular culture – again, averaging $200 each, despite their raggedy condition.

Here are a couple examples – I also found the ‘real’ movie posters for the films.. quite the artistic license I must say!!!



You gotta love the head in the field eating someone's amputated arm... oh, and the red bugs coming out of the lday's head. I just can't figure out why she's only in a bra?! And the main guy there looks like a bad cross between Beetlejuice and Freddie Kruger! :)



The real poster is just so dull in comparison!



With this one, it appears the artist may have seen the actual poster, but decided to localize it - Bond and his female companion have become browner.. but I can't make out what the huge red fish is for?!! Then there is the issue of tenses - the spy obviously still loves this girl!



I bet Bond never knew he was a black star in rural Ghana!

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly inspires

An excellent, touching, chilling, soul changing movie is a rare thing. In this day of brutally stupid, insulting empty humour and gun happy blood spurting American crap churned out weekly.

Living in a country where there are no movie theaters anyway, and the video rental shops are all renting illegal hand-me-downs from their relatives overseas… it is even more rare to find a movie that moves you.

We found one this week. Miraculously we had a few nights of peace and time to vegetate – with no foreign business visitors to entertain… we decided to visit the video shop. In Ghana, the concept of racking movies alphabetically has not yet surfaced… so I did the usual eye scan over all the obviously ridiculous choices, until I found a few with interesting covers. One of them was a foreign film, which is usually a no-no in our house as ‘someone’ hates reading the subtitles, but this one claimed it had English dubbing. The name was obscure “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It caught my interest though, and for $2, I figured if it was unwatchable, we hadn’t broke the bank.

We set up our livingroom theater – (it does pay to have a gadget-man in your life at times…) and put the lights off to watch on the big pull down screen. Two hours later we were both moved. Deeply. What a movie, what a story, how excellently done, filmed, dubbed, presented. Wow.

The movie is an adaptation of a book. The book was written by the person who is the central character in the film. This is a true story about the former French editor of Elle magazine, who suffered a massive stroke and found himself completely paralyzed in every single way except his left eye. His mind was in top form. He was completely trapped in his body. With the painstakingly patient help of a speech therapist, he dictated the entire book by blinking letters… about his experience and view of the world around him.

One can’t help but imagine throughout the film what it would feel like to be in his place. To know it’s possible… it puts everything in perspective. It takes away everything we experience daily – completely turns life as we take for granted, on it’s head.

The depiction is touching, subtle, dark, a masterpiece.

Everyone should watch this film, read this book. Anyone who sees a film like this could not ignore the vast differences culturally between Europe and North America. It is presented without bling, without ‘in your face’ cinematography, without Hollywood names… it leaves one to see the real people in it, the gritty difficult reality, the mirror that we fear to hold up to ourselves…

But the journey is so worth it.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fourth Estate, hc, 144 pp, $24.95