Alile Sharon Larkin is an American film producer, writer and director. She is associated with the L.A. Rebellion, which is said to have "collectively imagined and created a Black cinema against the conventions of Hollywood and Blaxploitation film." Larkin is considered to be part of the second wave of these revolutionary black filmmakers, along with Julie Dash and Bill Woodbury. Larkin also co-founded the Black Filmmakers Collective.
While at UCLA, Larkin directed two 16mmshort films. Her first film The Kitchen, tells the story of a Black woman's mental breakdown, and compares her life in a mental ward to that of someone in prison, looking at the pressures and discrimination she faced that brought about her mental undoing. Her next film, Your Children Come Back to You, explores the issue of the assimilation of African Americans into a larger community. The film confronts issues of economic and social inequality, presenting them from a child's point of view. Your Children was followed by the film for which she is perhaps best known, A Different Image, which she completed in 1982. This film explores the complexities of a platonic relationship between a free-spirited young woman and the young man who is her best friend. A retrospective of her works, including a documentary on the making of "A Different Image," were set to screen on Friday, December 2, 2011, as part of a major film series, "L.A. Rebellion:Creating a New Black Cinema," part of Pacific Standard Time:Art in L.A. 1945–1980. After graduating from UCLA, Larkin produced a series of projects including the children's story, Dredlocks and the Three Bears, which has been called "an extremely playful and yet undeniably political" animated re-imagining of the story of Goldilocks with a Black female protagonist. Her upcoming project is a children's music DVD called 'Tie Dye', which is currently in production. Larkin is also a published writer. Her article "Black Women Filmmakers Defining Ourselves: Feminism in Our Own Voice" was published in 1988 in E. Deidre Pribram's Female Spectators: Looking at film and television, which was part of an informal 13-book series called "Questions for Feminism". Her screenplay for A Different Image was published in 1991 in a book of collected works from six different independent filmmakers, called Screenplays of the African American Experience. Along with other members of the L.A. Rebellion, Larkin is the subject of an upcoming documentary from director Zeinabu Irene Davis called Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA.
Cinematic style and influence
Larkin often uses a non-linear narrative style in her films, and her cinematic style has been described as using "collage and abrupt editing, evokes a self-reflexive form that disrupts the spectator's pleasurable and seamless identification with story and protagonist." Larkin has been described as a filmmaker who has "greatly contributed to the advances of black women in the ongoing struggle for representation". She is also considered to be among the most influential African American independent filmmakers, a group that has "committed to developing a film language to respectfully express cultural particularity and Black thought."
