Cinema's First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy

In-person:

Karen Pearlman, filmmaker; Lilya Kaganovsky, professor and chair, UCLA Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages & Cultures.

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Cinema’s First Nasty Women returns to the Billy Wilder Theater! Its name a riff on the feminist cri de cœur that arose during the 2016 presidential election, Cinema’s First Nasty Women is an ongoing, curated project to rediscover and revel in the anarchic spirit of women comedians who brought a rebellious energy to the early silent screen. Organized by an international team of film archivists and scholars, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, this new travelling program of restored titles from the project comes with a special twist. Archival collections can inspire new research which in turn helps grow new audiences, but they can also inspire new films. Based in Australia, with The Physical TV Company, filmmaker and author Karen Pearlman has built a feminist film practice that puts cinema’s past and present in dialogue in brilliantly constructed, canon-busting short film essays. For “Cinema’s First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy,” Pearlman drew on the project's images and energy for her latest short, Breaking Plates. The Archive is thrilled to have Pearlman as our guest at the Billy Wilder Theater with a selection of her work along with the Los Angeles premiere of Breaking Plates and the silent slapstick female performers that inspired it.

Programmed by Paul Malcolm with Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen. Notes written by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm.

Woman with an Editing Bench

Australia, 2016

Channeling the explosive montage editing style of Soviet-era filmmaker Elizaveta Svilova, Karen Pearlman centers Svilova’s creative contributions in Dziga Vertov’s work, including Man With a Movie Camera, among their many other other documentary collaborations.

DCP, color, 15 min. Director/Screenwriter: Karen Pearlman. With: Leeanna Walsman, Richard James Allen, Marcus Graham.

After the Facts

Australia, 2018

Director Karen Pearlman reclaims the “Kuleshov Effect” from the male theorist who named it for Esfir Shub and the other pioneering Soviet-era women editors who actually developed and deployed it on screen.

DCP, b&w, 5 min. Director/Screenwriter: Karen Pearlman.

I want to make a film about women

Australia, 2019

In this “speculative love letter to Russian constructivist women,” director Karen Pearlman reimagines how leading Soviet-era artists, including filmmaker Lilya Brik, designer Varvara Stepanova and editor Esfir Shub, transformed their kitchens into labs for collective creative exploration and production during a period of harsh repression and marginalization.

DCP, b&w, 12 min. Director/Screenwriter: Karen Pearlman. With: Victoria Haralabidou, Inga Romantsova, Liliya May.

Breaking Plates

Australia, 2024

Galvanized by the anarchic energies on display in the films of the Cinema’s First Nasty Women project but also acutely aware of the course of film history from there, filmmaker Karen Pearlman and her on-screen collaborator Violette Ayad confront the question, “What happened to our revolution?” Breaking Plates is less an answer than a declarative, spirited act to reclaim silent cinema’s disrupted female agency and channel it into a new liberated cinema of today.

DCP, color, 25 min. Director/Screenwriter: Karen Pearlman. With: Violette Ayad, Karen Pearlman, Richard James Allen.

The Nervous Kitchen Maid (Victoire a ses nerfs)

France, 1907

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Gonca Feride Varol, 3 min.

Rosalie and Her Phonograph (Rosalie et son Phono)

France, 1911

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Renée T. Coulombe, 4 min. Director: Romeo Bosetti.

Mary Jane's Mishap

U.K., 1903

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Gonca Feride Varol, 3 min. Director: George Albert Smith.

Zoé and the Miraculous Umbrella (Zoé et le parapluie miraculeux)

France, 1913

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Gonca Feride Varol, 4 min.

Léontine Pulls the Strings (Les ficelles de Léontine)

France, 1910

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Veronica Leahy, 7 min.

Hypnotizing the Hypnotist

U.S., 1911

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Gerson Lazo-Quiroga, 7 min. Director: Laurence Trimble.

Cunégonde the Coachwoman (Cunégonde femme cochère)

France, 1913

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Gonca Feride Varol, 6 min. With: Little Chrysia.

The Boy Detective or the Abductors Foiled

U.S., 1908

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by José María Serralde Ruiz, 5 min. With: Robert Harron, Edward Dillon.

The Maids’ Strike (La grève des bonnes)

France, 1906

DCP, b&w, silent with original music by Renée C. Baker, 7 min.

Total runtime: 103 min.

Part of: Cinema’s First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy