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 film era.” Featuring archival footage and dance reenactment, this film, produced by Richard James Allen for The Physical TV Company, 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 is curated by Karen Pearlman, Maggie Hennefeld, and Richard James Allen. The archival shorts are drawn from the Cinema's First Nasty Women compilation, released by Kino Lorber and curated by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi.
Sponsored by the UWM Film Department, UWM English Program in Media, Cinema and Digital Studies; and UWM Women's and Gender Studies with support from the Mellon Foundation.