Cinema Stylo Keynote 2025

Description

'Breaking Plates: creative entanglements across 125 years' is a hybrid keynote, investigating entanglements of documentary and fiction forms; archival and contemporary media; authorial and collaborative practices; first and fifth wave feminisms; and creative and analytic research methods as practiced by writer/director/editor/performer and screen academic Karen Pearlman. The keynote includes critical discussion and a screening of the award winning, 25-minute film Breaking Plates (Pearlman et al. 2024). Breaking Plates, a raucous documentary about the not-so-silent women of the silent film era, entangles “sober” documentary form with comedic and chaotic archive clips and contemporary re-animations. It asks the cross-dressed cowgirls and slapstick comediennes of early cinema: what did you know? What can we learn? And why are we so much more polite? This keynote unpacks the making of this cross-generational conversation to demonstrate the ‘distributed creativity’ model of film authorship and how directorial ‘vision’ is necessarily entangled with the agency, creativity, and intelligence of key cast and crew – past and present. This discussion and screening will put to the test Pearlman’s proposition that research can be fast moving and comedic, and still be an effective catalyst for reflection and insight. It will enact the core feminist principle that if we want to tell different stories, we have to tell stories differently.

Period	17 Jul 2025
Event title	Cinema Stylo Conference 2025
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	National