Breaking Plates

Representation of women in mainstream fiction is a persistent problem. The solution is not making women into men in action movies or returning us to passive roles in men’s stories. We need some other approaches, sources of inspiration, and role models. ‘Breaking Plates’ looks back to early film and finds women creating images of themselves in the early 20th century that are wilder, more exuberant, and more filled with rage than anything we are making now.

‘Breaking Plates’ lets us learn from the mentors of mayhem in early 20th century film who ‘assume a range of identities that gleefully dismantle traditional gender norms and sexual constraints’ (https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). We encounter early women cinematic storytellers and image makers who pushed back against the structures that contained them. Their methods teach us how to bust up controlling walls, undermine restraining rules, and create different images of women by creating images differently.

The big change that ‘Breaking Plates’ can help to bring about in the world is to the creation of images of women onscreen. By bringing the archive back to life and learning from it, ‘Breaking Plates’ aims to create options for radically different actions, characters, stories, emotion, and humour. Remixing and re-enacting the work of women of the past creates a new perspective on what women have done in film and what we could do now to define ourselves and take charge of the images we create.

In the short term, I would like to see women filmmakers responding to the film with a renewed optimism about their creative options, and women responding with excitement about seeing themselves differently onscreen. I teach and talk to a lot of young women and would like to provide them with material inspiring to their creative development and ideas about images of themselves and who they can be.

In the medium term, I would like to see some shifts in our film industries and funding bodies towards supporting more adventurous, hybrid, stylised, or genre defying work. If we want to tell different stories, we have to tell stories differently. A great outcome of ‘Breaking Plates’ would be demonstrating that telling stories differently is viable, engaging, and compelling.

The long-term outcome could be changed depictions of women onscreen and an expanded range of emotions we express and experience in the stories we tell about ourselves and how we tell them.

We are in partnership with the curators of ‘Cinema’s First Nasty Women’, a collection of 99 silent films spotlighting slapstick comediennes and cross-dressing women of the silent screen. The curators, Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota), Laura Horak (Carlton University Transgender Media Lab), and Elif Rongen-Kaynacki (Amsterdam Eye-Museum) are assisting us to secure the rights for us to use the archive for the project.

We have an ongoing relationship with Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP). News and discussion of ‘Breaking Plates’ will be hosted on the popular WFPP website.

Our partnership with Macquarie University provided support for the production phase, and access to state of the art gear and facilities. Macquarie also hosts the Creative Documentary Research Centre which provides the project with a highly collegial research environment and access to expert insights and advice from colleagues such as Tom Murray and Alec Morgan.

1. Discuss and share: distribution of the film via industry events and educational institutions will invite active discussion and provide structured activities for deepening understanding of representation and how to take charge of it through what you choose to watch, amplify and create.

2. Seek information: cross-promotion with advocacy groups such as WIFT and the Women Film Pioneers Project, and links to the work of the Screen Australia Gender Matters task force will be a feature of our social media campaigns.

3. Change behaviour or practice: audiences will be invited to make a difference themselves by creating images, characters, and stories on social media. Watermarked bits of the film will be made available for remixing with user’s own images and sounds for TikTok and Instagram. Hashtags will link this creative work to communities around the world to add to the groundswell of creative images and ideas about feminist protest.