The Image Is Cracked
The Image Is Cracked
Curated by Luke Fowler
Tuesday, October 21, 2025 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Blood Ah Go Run, Menelik Shabazz, digital projection, 1981, 20 mins
Hang on a Minute, Lis Rhodes, 1983, digital projection, 13 mins
Epiphany, Cerith Wyn Evans, 1984, digital projection, 24 mins
Swan, Alia Syed, 1986, 16mm, 4 mins
Sari Red, Pratibha Parmar, 1988, digital projection, 12 mins
Pedagogue, Stuart Marshall, 1988, digital projection, 10 mins
If British avant-garde cinema of the 1970s was defined, to a significant degree, by how it looked back reflexively upon the medium, young artists of the 1980s, in contrast, rejected many of these formal concerns in favor of cheap formats like Super-8 and video, deploying them on a range of different fronts, from political documentary to the hallucinatory post-punk style of the New Romantics. “The old rigid division between film and video began to break down,” scholar Michael O’Pray later recalled, “as content gradually took precedence over the integrity of the film medium itself. A new generation had no allegiance to what they saw as a hopelessly elitist and ‘academic’ film practice which too often seemed to illustrate high theory. In that Oedipal rejection, the new ‘avant-garde’ turned towards spectacle, performance and social, sexual and cultural politics.”
Artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler has organized a program that returns us to this rich yet still underappreciated moment, surveying the range of approaches that constituted the alternative cinemas developing in the UK of the 1980s. Britain’s violent political realities are confronted in Menelik Shabazz’s Blood Ah Go Run, his documentary about the events leading to the massive Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, as well as Pratibha Parmar’s Sari Red, a poetic memorial to Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a South Asian woman killed in a racist attack in 1985. Stuart Marshall’s Pedagogue presents a short monologue by dramatist Neil Bartlett spoofing Britain’s Clause 28, which outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” in education and government, while Cerith Wyn Evans’s Ephiphany captures the sybaritic vibrancy of the era’s queer club scene.
It would be a mistake, however, to cleave the work that emerged in the 80s entirely from the decade prior. Many original members of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op remained active, their cinemas evolving in remarkable ways. Consider Lis Rhodes’ Hang on a Minute, a collection of 60-second movies commissioned by Channel 4, which served as engagé interruptions within television’s flow. One thinks too of works like Alia Syed’s early film Swan. Here, through repetition and rephotography—emblematic formal strategies of the previous generation—she transforms the rather obvious beauty of her eponymous subject into an entirely different beast.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.