Art & Artists
BREAKING PLATES
Year: 2024
Classification: G
Runtime: 25 min
Produced In: Australia and France
Directed By: Karen Pearlman, ASE
Produced By: Richard James Allen
Language: English
AVAILABLE NOW as a digital file for home viewing or education use, or for screenings. DVDs will be available in late October (you can pre-order now).
A raucous documentary about the not so silent women of the silent film era, Breaking Plates defiantly asserts the principle that if we want to tell different stories, we have to tell stories differently.
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.
VIEW TRAILER HERE: vimeo.com/1229727879
For decades after 1925, movies in Europe and the USA were made almost entirely by men. 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 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.
The film is an international collaboration with the curators of the groundbreaking four DVD/Blu-Ray set Cinema's First Nasty Women. The rambunctious 99 films that inspired Breaking Plates were made between 1896 and 1926 and brought together by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi into a collection which The New York Times describes as: "A mind-expanding endeavour ... a triumph ... These are not the polite, weak sisters of cinema — there's a lot of muscle and mischief to go with those long skirts!" - Manohla Dargis, 19 August, 2022.
Breaking Plates won its first award in Sydney (Best Short Documentary at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival, 2025) and then a year later it won the Best Short Film in Turin at 'Filmare la storia'- Telling Contemporary History through Film. In between, it went on a whirlwind-world-tour of well over 30 international festivals, archives, repertory cinemas and conferences.
With Violette Ayad, Karen Pearlman, R.J. Allen, Julie-Anne Long, Emma Watkins, Jadzea Allen
Writer and Director - Karen Pearlman
Producer - Richard James Allen
Associate Producers – Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi
Co-Producer – Martin Thorne
Choreographer – Karen Pearlman
Cinematographer – Justine Kerrigan ACS
Production Designer – Camille Ostrowsky
Editor – Karen Pearlman ASE
Composer – Angela Little
© 2024, A Physical TV Company production
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