Coming to America: Renewed Acclaim for the Artists of Accra On one fateful day in 2011, a friend walked into Brian Chankin’s Chicago video shop and showed him a copy of the book Ghanavision: HandPainted Film Posters from Ghana. He had never seen anything like it, and this brief encounter came to redefine his life’s work. The shop was called Odd Obsession Movies, and this obsession began to shift towards another equally cinematic realm. Chankin inherited his father’s love of action and horror films and, in the mid to late 1980s, he started recording films from TV. This became a collection of more than 20,000 VHS tapes and, latterly, DVDs. He would also dub tapes by connecting two VCRs, and in the early 2000s he started selling them at Odd Obsession Movies in Chicago. Meanwhile, in West Africa, the relatively new technology of VHS cassettes was being put to another use: the ‘Ghanaian Mobile Cinema’. These video clubs saw entrepreneurs travelling through rural Ghana with a TV, VCR, generator, and some videos. They showed the films in make-shift screening areas, bringing something of the big screen to small villages with little or no electricity. Due to copy-blocking technology on videos for bigger budget Hollywood productions, the films shown in these Ghanaian Mobile Cinemas were lower-budget features, especially straight-to-video action movies. Other genres were also popular due to their availability. These included Hong Kong martial arts films, Bollywood productions, and those being made more locally in Ghana (Ghallywood) and Nigeria (Nollywood). The competition between the Ghanaian Mobile Cinemas led to them advertising their screenings with posters commissioned from local artists. These were typically painted on flour sacks sewn together to create a canvas, and they would travel with the video club from village to village. Sam Roberts explores how Chicago-based Deadly Prey Gallery is working to preserve hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters and promote and sustain the work of Ghanian artists by commissioning new work ▲Alien by Magasco Sam Roberts is the editor and publisher of BLAG (Better Letters Magazine), the world's only print and online publication dedicated to sign painting. He has written numerous books and articles on the craft and its history, and first became interested in the topic via the fading ‘ghost’ signs around London. SignLink subscribers can sign up with a special discount to the publication via bl.ag/signlink. Find more about Roberts and his work via: bl.ag and ghostsigns.co.uk The posters would typically be somewhat disconnected from the content of the films, as the artists often hadn’t seen them and cover artwork wasn’t available on the dubbed VHS tapes. The video club owner would outline what was to be included on the poster, with the objective of catching the eye of potential patrons and selling ADVENTURES IN SIGN PAINTING WITH SAM ROBERTS Everything somehow made sense in not making sense; even though many of the titles I already knew, something was definitely off with the interpretation, which of course fascinated me more 36 Issue 252 - April / May 2024 www.signlink.co.uk
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