African Movie Posters

A generator coughs to life in a village square, and a sheet goes up for the evening show. African movie posters of this kind are Ghanaian, hand-painted advertisements made for the mobile cinemas of the late 1980s and 1990s, when operators with a television, a VCR and a gasoline generator carried Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood and Hong Kong films to villages and city neighborhoods. To save money the painters worked on cotton flour sacks, one side of a 50kg sack or two stitched together, and often had not seen the film. They added what sold tickets: blood, monsters, aliens, skeletons, outsized weapons. Slither, Species 3, Van Helsing, Wing Chun, Braindead, Naag Pooja.

Flat poster-paint color and creased cloth, with the energy of street art. One poster carries a media room or a bar; a cluster turns a stairwell into a cinema lobby. Seeing the film was optional.