TITLE:  Dangerous Covenant

TYPE:  Action

DATE OF CREATION: 2000s

ARTIST:  Unknown

SIZE:  59” H x 46” W

MEDIUM:  Acrylic on opened up flour sack

CONDITION:  This is not a reproduction, but an authentic period piece.  It displays all the earmarks of having been used, showing surface wear commensurate with use.  Pin marks and holes are evident in the corners, showing it was put up and taken down multiple times.  Overall, it is in very good condition.  Please note:  The original used condition combined with compelling imagery is precisely what gives this piece, like many others, a "character and feeling" altogether different than a copy.  Please examine the photos. 

SHIPPING: Standard shipping charge for Domestic Post is $25.00 USD.  This method includes careful wrapping and folding for shipment.  For an additional cost, we can roll and ship the poster in a poster tube.  The additional cost is dependent on the size of the poster, method of shipping, and the final shipping destination. Overseas postage at cost.

GENERAL BACKGROUND:  In the late 1980s a cottage industry developed in Ghana, West Africa composed of entrepreneurs who possessed three pieces of property – a TV, videocassette recorder (known then as a VCR), and a portable, gas powered generator. Armed with these tools they set up itinerant, make shift theaters inside social clubs, houses, and restaurants where they showed movies on the VCR and sold tickets to a delighted and noisy audience.  Sometimes, they even traveled from village to village; but it was the need to attract customers that gave birth to what is now recognized as a distinctive, compelling collectible — the Ghanaian movie poster.

Generally speaking, the movies they showed fall into four broad categories: Hollywood movies, most often obscure titles with an occasional hit thrown in for good measure; Bollywood movies from India; Kung Fu movies from the Hong Kong film industry; and Nollywood movies from Nigeria along with their Ghanaian counterparts.

The artists who created the posters were essentially commercial illustrators who used acrylic paint to make shop signs and other forms of advertising. When it came to the canvas their own economic circumstances and resourcefulness led them to use opened-up flour sacks.  This material was cheap, readily available, and the perfect size for large posters. These were posters meant to be displayed outside, and surviving posters often have the patina of authenticity, having “aged” in a distressed, engaging manner.

Ghanaian movie posters always present a lurid, colorful patchwork of images intended to attract, engage and entice the viewer. Each and every time they succeed in sucking the viewer into an imaginary, surreal world which may or may not be relevant to the film. As art and advertising, they are wildly successful, and it is the combination of the two which makes them memorable, indeed unforgettable when compared to other movie memorabilia and poster art in general.  Today, the creation of these posters has all but disappeared as they have been replaced by printed advertising.  This and the other original posters we are selling represent a brief moment in time when art, ingenuity and advertising met in the cross hairs of history - and then they were gone. 

P0900-224