Support Karen Pearlman’s new film Breaking Plates

Contribute to the post-production grant for Breaking Plates, directed by Karen Pearlman, today!

Cunégonde in action. Courtesy of the EYE Filmmuseum/Desmet Collection.

“Move aside Wonder Woman. Drop the pretence, Doris Day. The film images that confine women to a ‘realistic’ role as housewife, nag, babe, or bitch have defined us for too long. Especially because in early cinema, before narrative conventions were iron-clad, there were so many more ways to behave. For decades, movies were made almost exclusively by men in Europe and the USA after 1925. So, the slapstick comediennes and cross-dressed cowgirls of early cinema, who were wild, powerful, rude, funny, and utterly out of male control, got forgotten, or worse, erased. ‘Breaking Plates’ collaborates with the curators of ‘Cinema’s First Nasty Women’ to bring them back into view. ‘Breaking Plates’ puts early films on the screen and then we talk to the characters in them, re-animate their antics, emulate their mayhem moves. As we wear their clothes and battle their haywire machines, exploding gags, and eruptive bodies, we learn to wield humour as a weapon against the structures that contain us. We break realism and it is not just a victimless crime to do so, it is a creative act, opening the doors to a whole new reality for women in cinema, and, who knows, maybe in the world.”

To read more about this documentary project and to support it, visit the Documentary Australia website.