Ghanaian Movie Poster

Someone, somewhere in Ghana, painted this to sell a Friday night.

Mobile cinema took off in the late 1980s: entrepreneurs traveled from village to village with a TV, a VCR and a portable gas-powered generator, and showed movies. The need to attract customers produced the Ghanaian movie poster, painted on canvas, nearly four feet by five.

They almost always present a lurid, colorful patchwork of images meant to attract, engage and entice. Sometimes grotesque, melodramatic or downright ludicrous, and unfailingly memorable.

Subtlety was left at home.