From Ghana, an original hand-painted on flour sacks movie poster for Operation Cobra (Inferno), a movie I scored for director Fred Olen Ray and producer Roger Corman in 1996.
Here is some information on these works of art from a seller on Ebay:
With the arrival of video and video cassettes during 1980's in Ghana (West Africa) a small-scale film distribution mobile Cinema was created.
The local operators were equipped with a television, a video and occasionally with a portable generator. They were moving from place to place showing their films - sometimes inside social clubs or houses and during the night in open air!!!
In order to gather as many spectators as possible they had to advertise their business and they needed huge posters. Because of this a new form of art was born.
Talented artists after viewing the films were creating large size posters using oil paint on canvas, but because of the unavailability and high cost of the imported canvases, the artists were using used flour sacks sewn together.
The artist had the freedom to add and change scenes seen, or not seen, in the movie in order to make the poster more attractive. This is the reason that this hand painted posters are considered more as an ART than the usual posters. Each of them is UNIQUE and except the film content they express the vision of artist himself.
Because of the posters "hard" life ( transported folded or rolled, displayed under the rain and sun for several months during their rounds all over Ghana) most of the posters were destroyed and the surviving ones have damages at the ends of the canvas, peelings, cracking and other signs of wear.
By the mid 1990’s, since television and video were more widely available in Ghana, the popularity of the mobile Cinema business declined and almost collapsed.
The profits of the mobile Cinema operators decreased and they were not able to afford the "expensive" artists to paint their posters anymore.
