Movie Posters From Ghana in the 1980s and 90s
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The post showcases vibrant and humorous movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s, sparking discussion about their artistic value and cultural significance.
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Oct 26, 2025 at 11:47 AM EDT
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When will Westerners stop treating Africa as a monoculture.
Either of these better titles or no?
“…from Ghana, Africa…”
“…from Africa’s Ghana…”
(China, Asia & Asia’s China don’t really fit so probably not?)
The Asia comparison would work better if instead of talking about China we were talking about Laos.
No need to cherry-pick some random metric and try and justify a point that's not worth justifying.
I'm not justifying anything. I also think it's more polite to say "Ghana" rather than "Africa". I just don't agree with the arguments.
Now, if you asked the same about Pakistan or Nigeria (#5 and #6 in terms of population, but far smaller and with far shorter sea borders), I'd bet that far fewer people would be able to pinpoint those with the same accuracy (whether in the English-speaking world or not).
You still need to know that it's the second-largest country in the world though
This goes beyond mere politeness; that you used this word is a bit suggestive. Refusing to acknowledge an identity is far more than just a lack of politeness.
Asia is only ~50% larger than Africa.
I expected different posters for the same movie from different African countries.
Imagine buying a cook book of European cuisine only listing UK dishes.
Like a tour guide for the US and you only list places in Texas.
This is merely an example where the writer of the headline believes that the average reader may not be familiar with the country of Ghana. If the demographics include Americans, I'd have to guess they were spot on. (I'm American, I know how Americans are.)
Would it really be similarly offensive if a headline referred to something happening in "South America" when actually it happened in Guyana? Or, a headline about something happening in "Europe" when actually it happened in Andorra? None of these headlines are inaccurate. They're just not specific.
I can obviously see why this is frustrating but to me it's a complete misunderstanding to blame the person writing the headline.
Yes. It's like saying that the art and culture in Georgetown is very similar to the art and culture in Santiago. Especially when you claim to be an arts-and-culture website. Would a Texan like being stereotyped by a tourist who thinks all of America is just like New York City?
> Or, a headline about something happening in "Europe" when actually it happened in Andorra?
What many people here are trying to point out is that the chances of seeing such a line about a European country (even a relatively unknown one) is waaaay less than the chances of seeing such a line about African/South American countries.
That does happen, and I don't think very many people consider it grossly offensive, the vast majority of people would probably find it mildly amusing at worst. (It is not lost on me that people feel this way partly because American culture is well-known around the world, so people are less defensive of it.)
On the other hand though, I don't think that the headline being less specific means that the article is making generalizations about Africa. The article itself is pretty immediately clear on that matter.
The only debatable part is that it's not all of Africa. But otherwise it's a very accurate description of the whole article.
Clickbait is "You won't believe the art that came out of this continent!" or "Look at the wild things artists did to attract an audience!".
Are you claiming that's not clickbait?
A sample from the website's About page:
> this site is my attempt at creating something that’s dedicated to discovering the hidden gems of the online realm (whether they be in the form of academic discourse, cutting-edge technology, cultural commentary, or artistic expression) and sharing them with care and consideration.
How is treating a country in the second largest continent in the world - which contains more than 50 countries, most of which have very distinct cultures - as representative of that continent showing care and consideration? Ghana is not an unfamiliar country, and most people, at the very least, know it's in Africa. If I confused Mexico with Canada, or Germany with Albania, I'd be treated as a dimwit, but somehow it's totally fine if I don't know the difference between Ghana and Kenya.
I agree with the parent comment; this "unfamiliar country" business needs to stop.
- To sensationalize the story by positioning it as a another manifestation of a supposed "African" nature/character.
- The idea that African countries by themselves are too insignificant to seek/need to know about, but an entire continents? OK, maybe. Many people are comfortable in ignorance, real or feigned.
Putting Ghana on the title would have been just fine. I'm Ghanaian btw.
Quality hardly matters when the real treasure was getting the movie in the first place.
One of those parents was a truck driver who was able to cross the Iron Curtain and always smuggled something interesting back.
Some other artists in this genre: Henri Rousseau (France), Niko Pirosmani (Gruzia), Edward Hicks (USA)
https://www.wikiart.org/en/niko-pirosmani/all-works#!#filter...
[0] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d5cc5f_5c451a5882264776a4...
https://deadly-prey-gallery.myshopify.com/cdn/shop/files/D18...
They go on tour with the posters and some movies. To hear them talk about it and reading through their book, it's obvious that they treat this seriously.
The net effect of this is that, while I can look at the pictures and admire them (if that's the word) I have no idea whether I can trust anything in the actual text, since any given claim might just be an LLM confabulation.
(Which is too bad, since on the face of it it seems quite interesting, and probably many of the things the LLM has generated are in fact true.)
Less of this, please.
The single live link suggests that they do.
https://deadlypreygallery.com
> The posters were typically painted on used flour sacks, sewn together and primed for colour. These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse.
> And the designs? Let’s just say they didn’t rely too heavily on accuracy.
LLM writing tropes that are so bad, they're good.
The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone: they were painted on flour sacks, used at mobile cinemas, now exhibited at galleries in the West, etc. And it provides citations and artists' names for those who want to learn more.
The art criticism is unsophisticated, the images don't completely match the descriptions, and some of the facts might well be hallucinated or at least taken out of context. But you got that with traditional media and human writers/editors too.
For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, though his personality is more interesting, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.
But this is exactly where being AI-written bothers me! I don't really mind the style (the LLMs have learned to write a particular way because 1. people write that way and 2. other people like it) and I don't have the "boooo stochastic parrot plagiarism machines booooooooo" sense of disgust at AI that some people have, but I do know that when LLMs write things those things are ... not always true.
(Of course when people write things they aren't always true either, but the LLMs get things wrong more than humans do.)
Which means that when the article tells me something interesting -- flour sacks! mobile cinemas! exhibited in galleries! -- I can't trust it. And that, for me, is the main damage that outsourcing your writing to an LLM does: it destroys trust.
Sure. But if the author doesn't notice the nonsense that the LLM is introducing, it harms as well as helping.
"Primed for colour" is a strangely uninteresting thing to be saying about the sacks. If this requires any non-trivial effort, it would make more sense to describe the process. If the author actually wanted to talk about that, chances are the LLM removed useful information.
And putting aside that "These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse." is three "classic LLM tropes" in a row ("not just any"; a gratuitous emdash where any dash at all only becomes necessary because of that introduction; an ascending tricolon), it's just a bizarre thing to say. First off, if the sacks were sewn together to make a larger banner, then it doesn't make sense to talk about rolling up the individual sacks. Second, the phrasing suggests something exceptional, but these are all totally ordinary and trivial properties of pretty much any sort of flour sack. Many different materials are used, but all of them would be "easy to roll up" when empty, and making them durable and reusable is just common sense in that environment. The artists were clearly just using a fairly obvious material they had at hand, so this sudden bit of marketing-speak is entirely out of place. Third, the features highlighted all have to do with the sacks, but not with either each other nor the banners. In particular, a sack being "ready for reuse" is ready for reuse as a sack, not for its material being repurposed for something completely different (we typically call that "recycling", not "reuse").
The bit about "the designs" may well even be true, but it's a complete non-sequitur here, a point that doesn't really merit deeper explanation.
The writing isn't just "banal" but nonsensical in context, veering off into free-association. There's more potentially being hallucinated here than just the "facts". Never mind the accuracy or truth of what's written; this sort of thing makes it hard to accept that the prose even reflects the author's intent.
Anyway, those are usually avoided in comments unless they are particularly egregious, because as per the guidelines:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The clickbait title is about "Africa" and "bad", but it's specifically about Ghana and awesome.
Anyway, I'm Ghanaian, and you can AMA. There's a lot of such art, many on walls of the erstwhile movie houses. Most of them are very realistic and collectible, but I guess only the garish ones command attention and so are easier to make into a story.
As a kid I once watched an artist paint one of these on a wall in a few hours, was very cool.
- Beasts of No Nation (film, shot in Ghana, starring Idris Elba, on Netflix)
- Gold Coast Lounge (afro-noir Black/White film, on Netflix/Amazon)
- Burial of Kojo (movie, on Netflix)
- Azali (movie, on Netflix)
Classic:
- Deadly voyage (1996 TV film starring Omar Epps, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQiaTWT_YYI)
- Heritage Africa (movie, 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg4UrYJKA_Y)
- Love brewed in an African pot (movie, 1980, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRze5uaNpVw)
- Things we do for love (early 2000s TV series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1sQd4BV0lI)
A BBC article on it: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20181107-the-last-film-po...
(the bbc seem to have lost the body of their original article)
https://www.instagram.com/losone_african_arts/
I like this movie poster art. I think it conceptually reflects what you will see in the movie. It also looks genuine and authentic.
[0]: https://x.com/sirjoancornella
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