Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana

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Summary: The Most Unusual Coffee Table Book You'll Ever See
Review: If you're going to insist on having coffee-table books lying around your house, you might as well have one filled with lurid, hand-painted posters for movies like "Hell Comes to Frogtown," "The Fatal Flying Guillotines," or "Confessions of a Window Cleaner," right? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause here is just such a book-filled with beautiful color reproductions of posters for these, and many other fine movies, straight outta... Ghana. For a period of about ten years, from the mid-'80s to the mid '90s, entrepreneurs in Ghana ran traveling movie screenings, featuring the latest (or not so latest) videos from America and elsewhere. Their agents would pull into town, rent a public viewing space, set up a TV and VCR running off a little generator, unfurl a poster, and voila-instant movie house. Here, presented for the first time in the West are several hundred of the posters, divided into sections with little one-page celebrity introductions, along with a few art expert essays. It depressingly comes as no surprise that of the 230 pages devoted to the posters, 200 are in the "action/adventure," "war and urban commando," "horror," "science fiction and fantasy," and "martial arts" sections, with only 30 pages on "comedy and drama." Interestingly, this last section is largely filled with homegrown films from Ghana and Nigeria, with very few American entries. Clearly, this is because American humor and drama don't export as well as guns, blood, and sex, which are universal-although this is left unstated.

What is stated in most of the section introductions is fairly bland praise to the tune of "look how movies can cross cultures and have meaning even in Africa" and "see how these movies fit into the rich tradition of storytelling." Screenwriter Walter Hill at least has the honesty to say "many of these posters are more interesting than the films." The essays by the art experts attempting to place these posters in a larger historical context of African art manage to utterly fail. Particularly egregious is Deidre Evans-Pritchard's inane assertion that "Just as British television dramas are culturally repackaged for American audiences, so the hand-painted movie posters serve to claim the movies for the people of West Africa." The notion that one businessman paying an semiprofessional artist to paint an advertising poster for "Leprechaun 2" (page 199) so that other people will pay money to watch it somehow "claims" it, is patently silly. The critical difference with her analogy is that the advertising is slightly repackaged, the content certainly isn't. As I leafed through the book, seeing endless images of guns, bare breasts, blood, Rambo, Van Damme, Delta Force, and the like, I was vaguely unsettled. If, through cultural globalization, this is all they're getting from the U.S., what effect will it have on their cultural production, or on their perception of America? Whatever the answer-this is a great book to leave lying around your coffee table. A great companion to this is What It Is... What It Was, which is a slightly less lavish book on blaxploitation poster art.

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Summary: Funhouse mirror of American culture
Review: In Ghana, paying cinema customer line up around a glorified TV set and watch the dross of American cinema, striaght-to-video stuff starring Jan Michael Vincent or Chuck Norris. And to publicize these films, artists paint posters in raging, primitive style with images not usually found in the films. The art is just incredible and horrendous (in the best meanings of the term) and one can only speculate on what cultural filters go into their making. THE coffee table book of the year.