Description:

A Different Image (Alile Sharon Larkin, 1982, USA, 16mm, 52 min.)
Perfect Image? (Maureen Blackwood, 1988, UK, 35mm, 30 min.)

Different Image/Perfect Image? brings together two films that depict the ways cultures project standards of beauty and identity onto Black women, while also exploring how photography and cinema can articulate a different image of Black female empowerment. Alile Sharon Larkin’s intimate and nuanced narrative A Different Image emerged from the groundswell of Black independent filmmaking that was the L.A. Rebellion movement of the 70s and 80s. Maureen Blackwood’s playfully postmodern Perfect Image?, meanwhile, finds the director breaking out of the London-based Sankofa Film and Video Collective to explores similar themes within Black diasporic communities in the United Kingdom.

A Different Image will be screening from a restored print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive.

(FREE)

This screening is part of the Block Cinema series
Hank Willis Thomas: Different Image
April 13-May 31

The subversive appropriations of commercial imagery in Hank Willis Thomas’s Unbranded series, on view in the Block’s main gallery, serve as a launching pad for this series, which looks at the ways filmmakers have used cinema to explore—and to dismantle—socially-imposed images and identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The title of the series comes from Alile Sharon Larkin’s singular, under-seen 1982 film A Different Image, in which a young Black woman confronts sexual objectification in both her environment and in her relationships with friends and coworkers. Images create structures of oppression in films as diverse as Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), but what these films share above all is the pursuit of visual strategies for creating a disobedient, self-determined image.