Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Karen Pearlman and the Physical TV Company continue to create the most innovative and thought-provoking films in cinema today. The latest, Breaking Plates, is as powerful as it is ambitious, leaning into the processes of filmmaking and its historical legacy to raise questions about the creative process, female agency, and the fragility of the structures that contain all of us. These questions aren’t answered semantically in the work, but rather visually, though exuberance, song, dance, play, and yes, the symbolism of plate breaking.
There are many kinds of breakages in this work but the most notable is the breaking of the fourth wall to engage directly with the audience. This is partly done by the transparency of the processes of filmmaking, as we see Pearlman at the mixing board, pulling levers that are brought to life by the terrific actors, including rising star Violette Ayad. The actors both engage with Pearlman as filmmaker, commenting on the impacts of what she’s making them do, and across the different film media including interacting with the archival images. This creates a terrific tension between past and present, direction and realisation, and between the creative process and its output, as well as incorporating the actors own agency to the mix. Pearlman own textbooks are brought into play along with references to other films, like the award-winning Editor’s Anthology” trio about women and cinema and of course the black and white archival footage from Cinema’s First Nasty Women, a collection of 99 silent films sourced from 12 international film archives and libraries. The montage approach happens smoothly, art and craft working together in a synergy that feels both revolutionary and natural.
Much of the film is built around questions about creativity and art: “can we exist by making its image”, about women’s empowerment: “what happened to our revolution?”, “do you have to be subversive to take agency”, and about the nature of what it means to be alive and engaged in the world around us as active and vital participants making our own stories: “How do we stay in motion?” The answers are collaborative, emerging in the open space between the viewer and film and the conversation between the different media types.
These archival films are utilised in a visually striking way with the black and white archive mirrored by modern actors to create a literal (as well as metaphorical) conversation, with old and new actors talking on the telephone, handing notes to one another, throwing plates, sharing inventions, and even dancing together. These correspondences are not only funny in the way they violate realism (a “victimless crime”), but also magical, bringing the past to life so that it becomes poignant and present, even amidst a continual slapstick play of cross-dressing, feathers, fistfights, the throwing of flour, explosions, freeze frames, and use of fast motion. This creates a freedom for the reader to both suspend judgement and participate in the sense of exuberance, while also taking on the difficult philosophical and all-too-relevent political problems that the film engages with.
The result of all this play is a wonderful montage that is both beautiful—set against a beautiful backdrop in Toulouse with vibrant choreography, and loopy, breakage becoming an opening and an invitation to rethink what it means to be alive woman live in today’s world and what art can do to and for us to allow these openings to empower us. The continual question that the film raises is “how fragile are the structures that contain us?”. Walls fall down and characters burst out of the window, singing, dancing, shouting and breaking plates. The answer is clear that these structures, which seem so solid, are fragile indeed and it’s always possible to burst forth. Breaking Plates is utterly relevant and terrific fun, a film to watch repeatedly for the sheer joy of it, and to make our own conversations with the wild women of the past.
The Australian premier of Breaking Plates will be held on Saturday, Feb 8th at 1:15pm as part of the Antenna Documentary Film Festival at Dendy Cinema, Newtown. Visit: https://tinyurl.com/BP-Antenna for tickets.