Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana [Paperback]

Ernie, III Wolfe (Editor), John Yau (Author), Roy Sieber (Author), Ernie Wolfe III (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2001

CONTRIBUTIONS BY

Clive Barker
LeVar Burton
Deirdre Evans-Pritchard
Walter Hill
Angelica Huston
John Milius
Roy Sieber
Paul Hayes Tucker
Gus Van Sant
John Yau

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

African art scholar and West L.A. gallery owner Wolfe has performed a singularly stunning achievement by both introducing and cataloging over 350 luridly colorful examples of the unique way of advertising Hollywood and Hong Kong films in Ghana. Produced on recycled canvas flour sacks that have been stitched together, the posters were created mostly between 1985 and 1996 by a small group of artists to promote the movies shown in theaters and video clubs. To help elucidate this garish West African refraction of American pop culture, Wolfe has assembled numerous essays from a critically diverse array of artists, scholars, and filmmakers. Ghanaians, it quickly becomes apparent, are not chick-flick fans. The posters are divided among six film genres, including sf and fantasy, action and adventure, war and urban commandos, horror, comedy and drama, and martial arts. Writer and director Walter Hill nails it dead-on in his introduction to the action and adventure section when he writes, "To be brutally honest, many of these posters are more interesting than the films." Along with many lush, full-page representations of the posters, Wolfe includes photographs of and statements from the artists. In both idea and execution, Dilettante Press is carving a wonderfully quirky niche for itself in mainstream popular culture publishing with this visual treasure. Despite its seemingly narrow academic bent, this book is unconditionally and enthusiastically recommended for all pop culture collections. Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

CONTRIBUTIONS BY
Clive Barker
LeVar Burton
Deirdre Evans-Pritchard
Walter Hill
Angelica Huston
John Milius
Roy Sieber
Paul Hayes Tucker
Gus Van Sant
John Yau

Product Details

• Paperback: 305 pages
• Publisher: Dilettante Press (March 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 096642722X
• ISBN-13: 978-0966427226
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #606,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Most Unusual Coffee Table Book You'll Ever See, March 29, 2001

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana (Paperback)

If you're going to insist on having coffee-table books lying around your house, you might as well have one filled with lurid, hand-painted posters for movies like "Hell Comes to Frogtown," "The Fatal Flying Guillotines," or "Confessions of a Window Cleaner," right? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause here is just such a book-filled with beautiful color reproductions of posters for these, and many other fine movies, straight outta... Ghana. For a period of about ten years, from the mid-'80s to the mid '90s, entrepreneurs in Ghana ran traveling movie screenings, featuring the latest (or not so latest) videos from America and elsewhere. Their agents would pull into town, rent a public viewing space, set up a TV and VCR running off a little generator, unfurl a poster, and voila-instant movie house. Here, presented for the first time in the West are several hundred of the posters, divided into sections with little one-page celebrity introductions, along with a few art expert essays. It depressingly comes as no surprise that of the 230 pages devoted to the posters, 200 are in the "action/adventure," "war and urban commando," "horror," "science fiction and fantasy," and "martial arts" sections, with only 30 pages on "comedy and drama." Interestingly, this last section is largely filled with homegrown films from Ghana and Nigeria, with very few American entries. Clearly, this is because American humor and drama don't export as well as guns, blood, and sex, which are universal-although this is left unstated.

What is stated in most of the section introductions is fairly bland praise to the tune of "look how movies can cross cultures and have meaning even in Africa" and "see how these movies fit into the rich tradition of storytelling." Screenwriter Walter Hill at least has the honesty to say "many of these posters are more interesting than the films." The essays by the art experts attempting to place these posters in a larger historical context of African art manage to utterly fail. Particularly egregious is Deidre Evans-Pritchard's inane assertion that "Just as British television dramas are culturally repackaged for American audiences, so the hand-painted movie posters serve to claim the movies for the people of West Africa." The notion that one businessman paying an semiprofessional artist to paint an advertising poster for "Leprechaun 2" (page 199) so that other people will pay money to watch it somehow "claims" it, is patently silly. The critical difference with her analogy is that the advertising is slightly repackaged, the content certainly isn't. As I leafed through the book, seeing endless images of guns, bare breasts, blood, Rambo, Van Damme, Delta Force, and the like, I was vaguely unsettled. If, through cultural globalization, this is all they're getting from the U.S., what effect will it have on their cultural production, or on their perception of America? Whatever the answer-this is a great book to leave lying around your coffee table. A great companion to this is What It Is... What It Was, which is a slightly less lavish book on blaxploitation poster art.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Art Book You Will Ever Own, April 21, 2010

By 

The Southern Art Professor (Savannah GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana (Paperback)

You've got your Neo Rauch book, your "New Paintings" book, all those books that define the edge. You are jaded. You think you've seen it all. Get this book. These paintings bleed. They stare into the abyss of US (or the U.S.) and strip it to the ID. These paintings, though based on some of the most calculated, superficial, awful aspects of Western Culture are somehow the most honest and vital paintings you'll ever see. I refer to this book regularly. They are a perversely liberating experience! This is a big book, and you will 'discover' paintings in this book even after years of ownership.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funhouse mirror of American culture, December 8, 2002

By 

Greg Goodsell "Kitsch Man" (Bakersfield, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana (Paperback)

In Ghana, paying cinema customer line up around a glorified TV set and watch the dross of American cinema, striaght-to-video stuff starring Jan Michael Vincent or Chuck Norris. And to publicize these films, artists paint posters in raging, primitive style with images not usually found in the films. The art is just incredible and horrendous (in the best meanings of the term) and one can only speculate on what cultural filters go into their making. THE coffee table book of the year.