Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy

Followed by Q&A with the director Karen Pearlman.

Join us for this unmissable extravaganza of 11 rollicking short films about women who break kitchen plates and explode social boundaries! First, we open with Breaking Plates (2024), Karen Pearlman’s raucous new documentary about “the not so silent women of the silent era.” Featuring archival footage and dance reenactment, this film is inspired by the creative mayhem and wild physicality of Cinema’s First Nasty Women, a collection featuring fourteen hours of rarely seen silent films about feminist protest, slapstick rebellion, and suggestive gender play. 

Pearlman’s documentary will be followed by 10 short silent films from Cinema’s First Nasty Women (all with new music!) in which women break dishes, explode out of the chimney, go on strike, weaponize magical umbrellas, upend the gender binary, and discombobulate the patriarchy by any means necessary!

Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy is a riotously entertaining enactment of the principle that if we want to tell different stories, we have to tell stories differently. 

Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy

Breaking Plates (2024, 25 min). dir/ Karen Pearlman, w/ Violette Ayad, Richard James Allen, Emma Watkins, Julie-Anne Long, Jadzea Allen and Karen Pearlman.

The Nervous Kitchen Maid [Victoire a ses nerfs] (1907, 3 min). With original music by Gonca Feride Varol.

Rosalie’s Phonograph [Rosalie et son Phono] (1911, 4 min). With original music by Renée T. Coulombe.

Mary Jane’s Mishap  (1903, 4 min). With original music by Dreamland Faces.

Zoé’s Magic Umbrella [Zoé et le parapluie miraculeux] (1913, 4 min). With original music by Gonca Feride Varol.

Léontine Pulls the Strings [Les ficelles de Léontine] (1910, 7 min). With original music by Veronica Leahy.

Hypnotizing the Hypnotist (Laurence Trimble, 1911, 7 min). With original music by Gerson Lazo-Quiroga. 

Cunégonde the Coachwoman [Cunégonde femme cochère] (1913, 6 min). With original music by Gonca Feride Varol. 

The Boy Detective (1908, 5 min). With original music by José María Serralde Ruiz. 

Love and Science [Amour et Science] (1912, 14 min). With original music by Gonca Feride Varol. 

The Maids’ Strike [La grève des bonnes] (1906, 7 min). With original music by Renée C. Baker. 

Breaking Plates, written and directed by Karen Pearlman and produced by Richard James Allen for The Physical TV Company, is a collaboration with the curators of Cinema’s First Nasty Women. It is an outcome of the French and German International Screendance Residency project. Co-Producer: La Briqueterie-CDCN du Val-de-Marne. Associate Producer: La Place de la Danse – CDCN Toulouse / Occitanie. Its production received support from numerous sources, including Macquarie University and Museums of History NSW. 

Curated by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, and produced for video by Bret Wood, Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a partnership of Kino Lorber, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Women Film Pioneers Project, Eye Filmmuseum, FIC-Silente, and Carleton University. 

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