Current releases
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
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, 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 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 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.
Writer/Director - Karen Pearlman
Producer - Richard James Allen
A Physical TV Company production
BREAKING PLATES won its first award in Sydney (Best Australian Documentary at the Antenna Festival) and recently in Turin (Best Short Film at 'Filmare la storia' - Telling Contemporary History through Film). In between, it's been on a whirlwind-world-tour of well over 30 international festivals, archives, repertory cinemas and conferences.
Permalink: https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/19598