“World cinema is a lingua franca we all understand,” says Ernie Wolfe, a Los Angeles art dealer and collector who first noted the unusual artistry of Ghana’s cinema advertisements while traveling in the country in 1990. He now collects the posters. “These posters appeal to people because [they] invite this really incredible dialogue—a comparison between what you know of a film and how the painter imagined it. And they’re also just really good art.”

That, Wolfe says, is the kernel of the posters’ enduring mass appeal—they represent a sliver of cinema history that is now irretrievable, before the world-flattening effects of technology and globalization rendered it all but impossible to advertise a film in anything but the most literal terms. For nearly two decades in Ghana, the concepts behind the world’s most famous movies mixed freely with the imaginations of its most talented painters, creating a gaudy, gory, glittery tradition of pop art like none other in the world.

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Outside the workshop of the painter Daniel Anum Jasper in the Accra neighborhood of Teshie, a dusty stretch of road is crammed with a shifting band of hawkers roaming the streets with veritable mobile supermarkets balanced on their heads: everything from air fresheners and donuts to toddler-sized blue jeans and inflatable swimming pools. Among their most valuable wares, however, are stacks of bootleg DVDs.

To the American eye, the selection is wildly global—there are American rom-coms and Bollywood love stories alongside low-budget Nigerian thrillers and east Asian martial-arts movies. But as Jasper is quick to point out, Ghanaians have long been omnivorous consumers of the world’s cinema. As far back as his childhood in the 1970s, urban Ghanaians were enjoying Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood with equal enthusiasm in the city’s many cinemas.

“As a kid, we loved movies,” he says. “We went all the time.”

Outside of major cities, films were a far rarer commodity. Many villages lacked electricity, let alone the set up for a movie theater. But it didn’t take long for a few enterprising businesspeople—a population West Africa seems to possess in unusual abundance—to come up with a solution. They bought diesel generators, movie projectors, and VCRs, tossed them in the backs of trucks, and headed out to the hinterlands with their mobile cinemas in tow.

And along with Accra cinema owners, they soon began hiring local artists like Jasper—who in the mid 1980s was a young sign painter in Teshie—to paint posters advertising their wares.

Ernie Wolfe Gallery

“Sometimes they showed me the cassette of the movie, other times they would just describe the story,” he says. And from there, he was off, sketching his designs on old flour sacks and supplementing images of the film’s main actors with fires, guns, snakes, hacked-apart limbs, and laser beams. Nothing was too outlandish. “Just something to capture people,” he says.