Ghanaian Movie Poster

The generator hummed. The VCR whirred. The village came out to see.

In the late 1980s a cottage industry called mobile cinema grew up in Ghana: entrepreneurs traveled from village to village with a television, a VCR and a portable gas-powered generator, showing movies. Posters like this one, painted on canvas, were meant to draw the crowd.

They almost always present a lurid, colorful patchwork of images made to attract, engage and entice. Sometimes grotesque, melodramatic or downright ludicrous, and unfailingly memorable. This one measures about three and a quarter feet by four and a half.

Subtle was never the assignment.