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 ironclad, there were so many more ways to behave. For decades, movies were made almost exclusively by men in Europe and the USA after 1925. So, the slapstick comediennes and crossdressed cowgirls of early cinema, who were wild, powerful, rude, funny, and utterly out of male control, got forgotten, or worse, erased. Breaking Plates collaborates with the curators of “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” to bring them back into view. 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.

Karen Pearlman