Eye on Sound: Breaking Plates (soundwave)

Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy

Eye on Sound: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy

A rollicking programme of shorts that takes inspiration from the freedom of the first years of cinema to bring a boundary-smashing brawl and a creative revolution for women to the screen – wild, powerful, rude, funny, and deliciously mischievous. Featuring Breaking Plates and five short films from the 1910s.

In early cinema, before narrative conventions and production roles were iron-clad, there were so many more ways to behave and to create. After 1925, for many decades, movies were made and written about almost exclusively by men, and the expansive contributions of women were forgotten, or worse, erased.

The programme is introduced by writer/director Karen Pearlman. Producer Richard James Allen and Cinema’s First Nasty Women curators Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi will be there to join a roundtable, moderated by Kate Saccone.

Breaking Plates is an international collaboration with the curators of the groundbreaking four DVD/Blu-Ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women. The rambunctious 99 films in this box set were made between 1896 and 1926 and brought together by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi from Eye Filmmuseum and 12 other international film archives.

Programme

Breaking Plates (Karen Pearlman, 2024, 25')
Contemporary docudrama inspired by the creative mayhem and wild physicality of the slapstick comediennes and cross-dressed cowgirls of early cinema, who were wild, powerful, rude, funny, and utterly out of male control. It integrates clips from the deliciously mischievous silent shorts of the Cinema’s First Nasty Women collection, which feature more than fourteen hours of rarely seen silent films about feminist protest, slapstick rebellion, and suggestive gender play over four Blu-ray discs.

Karen Pearlman: “Breaking Plates puts early films on the screen and then we talk to the characters in them, reanimate 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.”
Short comedies with live musical accompaniment
Five short comedies from Eye Filmmuseum’s collection that are referred to in Breaking Plates, with live music by Martin de Ruiter:

Le Bateau de Leontine (FR 1911)
Cunégonde femme cochère (FR 1911)
Rosalie et son phonograph (FR 1911)
Amour et science (FR 1912)
Les Ficelles de Léontine (FR 1910)

This is part of

Eye on Sound Celluloid

Details

Production year

2025

Length

93 min.

Event language

English

Country

Part of

Eye on Sound

With Eye on Sound, Eye focuses on the special relationship between image and sound. Expect live music to silent films, live bands from today to classics of yesteryear, brand new scores to films from the versatile Eye collection and special attention to the often neglected art of sound design.

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