A cot­tage indus­try quick­ly sprang up in the ear­ly 80s when the first video­cas­settes made their way to the West African nation of Ghana. Armed with a TV, a VCR and a portable gen­er­a­tor, mobile cin­e­ma oper­a­tors set up shop in city neigh­bor­hoods and in rur­al berg and began to screen Hong Kong action flicks, Bol­ly­wood musi­cals, Niger­ian movies and Hol­ly­wood block­busters.

In order to pack their mobile the­aters, pro­mot­ers hired artists to design movies posters — usu­al­ly the sole means of adver­tise­ment for a screen­ing. As with a lot of adver­tise­ments in Sub-Saha­ran Africa, the posters were hand paint­ed on large pieces of can­vas or used flour bags. The artists – many of whom seem to have only a ten­u­ous grasp on per­spec­tive and human anato­my — were often­times com­mis­sioned to design a poster with­out hav­ing seen the movie or even real­ly know­ing what a giv­en movie star looks like.

The result­ing work is gar­ish, lurid and won­der­ful­ly strange. In an age when the posters com­ing out of Hol­ly­wood are bland and for­get­table, the rough-hewn style of these posters is a real joy — movie art with a pulse. The ver­sion of Cat­woman as adver­tised in the Ghana­ian poster above looks way more inter­est­ing than the actu­al movie.

The gold­en age of the mobile movie the­aters start­ed to decline in the 90s when more and more peo­ple were able to buy their own equip­ment. About that same time, West­ern col­lec­tors start­ed to buy and col­lect the posters.

Jeaurs Oka Afu­tu, a vet­er­an poster design­er who got his start when he was a teenag­er, reflects on his work. “Action and war works a lot … and women too: both actu­al­ly,” he said in an inter­view with CNN. “It all depends on what the audi­ence prefers.”

On this page, you’ll also find posters for The Matrix, The Ter­mi­na­tor, The Spy Who Love Me [sic] and Alien. Find more of these remark­able posters at Twist­ed Sifter.

via CNN

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gaze at Glob­al Movie Posters for Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond

See Ottoman-Style Posters of Star Wars, The God­fa­ther, Scar­face and Oth­er Clas­sic Movies

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Guiller­mo del Toro is per­haps the most visu­al­ly imag­i­na­tive direc­tor alive today. Unlike Paul Thomas Ander­son, with his infu­ri­at­ing­ly per­fect sense of visu­al bal­ance, or Alfon­so Cuarón, whose Oscar-sweep­ing Grav­i­ty required the inven­tion of a nov­el, hyper-real­istic film­ing method, del Toro doesn’t deal with real life. His domain is the fan­tas­ti­cal. There’s a chance you may not have liked Pan’s Labyrinth, and even the dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty that you’ve for­got­ten what­ev­er it is that hap­pens in Hell­boy, (some­thing about mon­sters? Sav­ing the world?), but I’d wager that its menagerie of hell­ish demons has been seared into your mem­o­ry.

Late in 2013, del Toro released a volu­mi­nous book, enti­tled Cab­i­net of Curiosi­ties: My Note­books, Col­lec­tions, and Oth­er Obses­sions. As he explains in the video above, the 256-page hard­cov­er is a selec­tion from his note­books, where the direc­tor devel­oped many of the mon­strosi­ties we’ve seen on screen.
The Guardian Sket notes that there’s some­thing of da Vinci’s note­books in del Toro’s records:  the small, neat script, mixed in with the won­der­ful­ly detailed sketch­es, com­bine to give the impres­sion of del Toro doing his best to record the tor­rent of his imag­i­na­tion before the thoughts dis­ap­pear. In this post, we include a num­ber of these images. The first three sketch­es, includ­ing the one above, depict del Toro’s draw­ings for Pan’s Labyrinth. The fourth is a page from his work on Hell­boy, and the fifth is art for his most recent film, Pacif­ic Rim.

From Pan’s Labyrinth

From Pacif­ic Rim

For those inter­est­ed in view­ing more of del Toro’s won­der­ful­ly bizarre sketch­es, a some­what larg­er gallery is avail­able here. The com­plete Cab­i­net of Curiosi­ties: My Note­books, Col­lec­tions, and Oth­er Obses­sions is avail­able at Amazon.com.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Film­mak­ing Advice from Quentin Taran­ti­no and Sam Rai­mi 

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary) 

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Every now and again, we like to bring you a reimag­in­ing of an old clas­sic. Some time ago, for exam­ple, we post­ed about a rein­ven­tion of Star Wars: A New Hope, shot by scores of ardent fans, and spliced togeth­er from 15-sec­ond frag­ments. Today, we’re writ­ing about anoth­er project that grew out of a twist on Star Wars, called Clas­sic Movies in Minia­ture Style. Murat Pal­ta, a Turk­ish illus­tra­tor, decid­ed to com­bine a west­ern film with the intri­cate two-dimen­sion­al motifs found in Ottoman minia­ture paint­ings, and got the sur­re­al result that you see above. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to Han Solo’s smug grin, and Darth Vad­er dal­ly­ing to smell the ros­es.

With Ottoman Star Wars hav­ing gar­nered high marks from his pro­fes­sors, and hav­ing enjoyed the project, Pal­ta decid­ed to keep with his theme and illus­trate oth­er icon­ic movies in the same style. Here are a cou­ple of oth­er movie posters he’s pro­duced since:

As you prob­a­bly guessed, the first depicts the final moments of Scar­face (1983), where a coked-out Tony Mon­tana rains bul­lets on a team of assas­sins who have infil­trat­ed his lav­ish com­pound. In the sec­ond, a com­pendi­um of God­fa­ther scenes, a regal Don Cor­leone lis­tens to sup­pli­cants, as Jack Woltz, in the bot­tom left-hand cor­ner, finds his prized stallion’s sev­ered head in his bed. While the con­cept is clever, what real­ly stands out in Palta’s illus­tra­tions is the lev­el of detail, from Brando’s sour facial expres­sion, to Tony Montana’s fez. The remain­der of the posters on his web­site, which include The Shin­ing, Alien, and a ter­rif­ic ver­sion of A Clock­work Orange, are no less impres­sive.

For more of Murat Palta’s Ottoman movie posters, vis­it his page at Behance.net.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars is a Remix

Star Wars Retold with Paper Ani­ma­tion