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Breaking Plates
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Breaking Plates will have its Australian Premiere on Saturday February 8, 2025, 1.00pm (not 1.15pm as initially advertised), at Dendy Cinemas Newtown (Sydney), on the shorts program of the Antenna Documentary Film Festival. General event link: https://antennafestival.org/program-2025/. The film: https://antennafestival.org/films/best-australian-shorts-session-one/.
I’ve always longed to put the fancy word metalepsis in the title of a film review, and Breaking Plates offers me the best shot I’m ever going to get at it. Metalepsis can mean several things in various realms of art and expression but, in relation to cinema, it has particularly come to signify this: “situations in which ontological layers that ‘should not’ be able to intersect nevertheless do so” (Dominic Lash, The Cinema of Disorientation). Such as when the Narrator in Max Ophüls’ La Ronde (1950) interrupts a saucy scene in progress to snip out some footage. Or when the in-film characters in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) step out of the screen and interact with the spectators. Or when a bloody rampage in Krazy House (2024) reaches beyond the frame to massacre the film crew ‘outside’ it. The classic animation Duck Amuck (1953) by Chuck Jones weaves more and finer variations on metalepsis in 6 minutes and 53 seconds than most narratological theorists can name in 6 years and 53 hours. Breaking Plates is metalepsis unbound – and for very good reasons. Breaking plates, smashing frames, bursting out of constraints … at stake in all this boisterous anarchy is the topic that writer-director Karen Pearlman discusses, epigrammatically, with lead actor Violette Ayad near the very start: “the problem of images of women on film” – which is also a problem of who is in control of them. The inspiration and source for the project is the superb DVD/Blu-ray release – for once I’ll allow myself to add that it is, rightly, award winning – Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022) curated by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, a collection of 99 films made between 1898 and 1926. Many of these films are comedies (slapstick, burlesque, farce) but the generic range is wide. The package gives us something potentially both bittersweet – a lost paradise of women’s proudly ‘unruly’ physical and creative expression, subsequently snuffed out (more or less) by the male march of film history – and utopian: the inspiration – or dare – to reinvent this paradise, to make that dream live once more in contemporary cinema. That’s the dare which Breaking Plates takes up. The moment that Karen’s “challenge” about the image of women has been posed to Violette and her troupe of dancers, the film is off on its merry metaleptic way. There is not only much intercutting between clips from the old ‘nasty women’ films and the present-day performers – there is literal dialogue between time-strata, whenever a phone on the set rings and a long-dead heroine has some urgent advice or wisdom to impart. Especially wonderful touch: since they’re in a silent movie, we don’t hear them speak, of course. We can only intuit, interpret them – by imagining a new fiction for them, and by ‘giving them voice’ through other means, such as Angela Little’s very lively, non-stop music score. Breaking Plates is a lot of things in a mere 25 minutes. It’s a story, of sorts – metaleptically interrupted, cut up, multiplied and spaced-out. Like Pearlman’s previous trilogy of film-history shorts, now called An Editor’s Anthology (2016-2020), it’s also an essay that announces (in dialogue and intertitles) its structure, its main points and stages. What is the substance of that essay? If there’s a lost paradise – or, still stronger, a lost revolution – at stake, then the film begins with initial upheaval, a joyous destruction of the givens. But exhaustion looms as an ever-present threat after that expenditure of energy. How to maintain the momentum over time, across history? That’s the Big Question of every Revolution (in one of the old films glimpsed, the women are rambunctious workers on strike). This is, from another angle, exactly the same vexing problem that Molly Haskell posed in her milestone work of feminist film polemic, From Reverence to Rape, in 1973: the loss (of once-upon-a-time ‘reverence’) that registered for her involved the sassy, screwball women (Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne) of the 1930s and ‘40s. How did we, collectively, fall so low? Whichever of these lines or traditions you investigate in women’s cinema, it would be wrong to assert that it was completely snuffed out: from Lucille Ball to Molly Shannon via Elaine May, plenty of plates, of one kind or another, have been subversively broken along the way. But still not nearly enough of them … As well, Breaking Plates is – and this is true not only of An Editor’s Anthology but all the work of The Physical TV Company – a dance film. Dance grasped in an expansive way, bridging the most elegant choreography and the most everyday motions. In it, Karen does a spot of dancing herself, here and there. Dance and choreography are part of her real-life portfolio. When she directs her performers – as we see that metaleptically staged here – her words sometimes give way to a gesture, a movement, a bodily rhythm that says more than any literary ‘script’ can. And I’ve seen Karen do that elsewhere – in teaching, for example. Because Karen is also an ace editor, author of the renowned textbook Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing (3rd edition 2025). And Breaking Plates is absolutely stunningly edited – I counted 8 cuts within the first 25 seconds alone (with hundreds more to come)! And that makes it, in this list of nominal categories, a montage-film, to boot. So: story, essay, dance, montage. And thoroughly metaleptic. Karen is a director in metalepsis all the way. (Credit due also to her co-writer, Samuel Lucas Allen, and cinematographer Justine Kerrigan.) She’s in the movie, playing herself. She’s the Controller, just like the Animator of Duck Amuck: in fact, her amazing Control Desk can do everything from punching in specific sound effects to creating a full fade-out of the photographic image. But Karen also becomes a spectator who can only watch – in shock and delight – as ‘the film’ unfolds right in front of her eyes (pixilation effects in sudden black-and-white included) and, in fact, gets right away from her control. Because that’s needed, that matters, too: to lose control, as much as to get one’s hands on it. Jadzea Allen – the credits are full of Allens and, as Julie-Anne Long in the role of Volatile Housemaid mutters to pesky ‘Handsome Hank’ Richard James Allen as she dismisses him from the frame: “You’re always in Karen’s films” – she confronts the director with exactly this: she has to let her performers go, let them take control, literally fly out the window … rather than (in a superbly ‘quoted’ image) stand gazing out of it, dreamily. As I watched Breaking Plates, I remembered (from almost 50 years ago) one of the great, ecstatic experiences of my cinephile life: Marion Davies (yes, the one smothered by the Hearst/Kane legend) in King Vidor’s The Patsy (1928) of which she was star and co-producer – no relation to Jerry Lewis’ highly metaleptic 1964 film of the same name. I’ve never seen it since, but I must see it again now. I retain an impression of Davies’ physical energy, and all the ways that Vidor’s intuitive mise en scène enhanced it. As with a similar revelation for me, the children in Ozu’s I Was Born, But … (1932), I had the sense, spinning before my eyes, that Davies was truly inventing gestures I had never seen before – or had never seen turned to exactly this purpose, each time. The motto of burlesque comedy, as Luc Moullet once remarked, is that the performer must stoop to conquer: in other words, must be willing to make themselves wild and grotesque, never consider themselves ‘above’ any seeming vulgarity or bodily deformation. Pearlman gives this slogan another twist: she wants to somehow recapture the equilibrium of (as she says) care and carelessness, grace and disgrace, heaviness and lightness, that these fabulous women of 1898-1926 projected. Breaking Plates gets to that point of equilibrium, and it’s something to celebrate. © Adrian Martin 1 February 2025 |
