Cinema's First Nasty Women

27/02/2025

Buckle up for 'Gender Adventures' in Texas!!!! We're coming to the Cactus Theater in Lubbock on Tues, March 4th with a special program co-presented by Cinema's First Nasty Women curators Laura Horak & Maggie Hennefeld! 🎞🎩🌈😍

https://www.cactustheater.com/upcoming-productions/2025/3/4/6bl9j48s4jw8504u8hfua20toe855k

24/02/2025

QUEENS OF DESTRUCTION 🎞🌪 tore down the house (metaphorically) at the beautiful The Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR last night!!! Down with patriarchy, long live the queens!

19/02/2025

We're taking "Gender Adventures" on the road to TX!!! Presented in person by Laura Horak & Maggie Hennefeld. 🎞🌈

Save the date for our March 4th screening of GENDER ADVENTURES, a program of silent films curated by our special guests, film historians Laura Horak and Maggie Hennefeld.

See you at the Cactus Theater!

18/02/2025

We're coming to Portland, OR this Sunday night!! Don't miss Léontine and her cohort of QUEENS OF DESTRUCTION at The Hollywood Theatre on Feb 23rd at 6:30 pm, presented by co-curator Maggie Hennefeld -- with our glorious original music! 🎞📽🎶

Chaos reigns supreme in this program of rarely-seen silent films! The “queens of destruction” organize labor strikes, bake (and weaponize) inedible desserts, explode out of chimneys, electrocute the police force, and assume a range of identities that gleefully dismantle traditional gender norms ...

11/02/2025

Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour is a treat for film lovers, showcasing important stories and film history.

09/02/2025

We're thrilled to see a shoutout to WFPP (and the amazing Edited By) in an interview with interdisciplinary artist Krista Steinke in Women Cinemakers!

Read the full interview with Steinke here: https://anyflip.com/zdckd/hooq/

Among other things, she discusses her moving image work "Time Scraps: Film Threads and Sprocket Holes," which is inspired by the early female colorists and film cutters.

08/02/2025

Nothing says Happy Valentine's Day like a romantic Texas Guinan rainbow mug or a sweet Léontine hoodie!! 💘🌈

cinemasfirstnastywomen.threadless.com

*Check out our online shoppe for that perfect gift for your special someone!!!! 🎈☕🎞️

03/02/2025

Congratulations to all our sisters & friends of CFNW for sweeping the Léontine Awards in this year's prestigious Silent London poll!!!!! 🎊🎈🏆🪗 Including co-curators Elif Kaynakci (for her innovative Sine Nomine program) and Maggie Hennefeld (for her book 'Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria & Early Cinema'), our feminist comrades Neil Brand (for his resplendent orchestral score to Winning of Barbara Worth), Stephen Horne & Frank Bockius (for The Wind AND Song!), Bonn Stummfilmtage, Eye Filmmuseum player, & HippFest (for their well-deserved shoutouts!), Dansk Film Database - www.danskefilm.dk (for best streaming platform), Ed Larusso (who wore multiple hats!), and last but not least, our lord & savior Le Giornate del Cinema Muto for icing pretty much every other category!!!!! And of course the legendary Pamela Hutchinson for orchestrating this whole shebang. ❤️ Long live silent cinema!!!!! In memory of Donna Hill.

https://silentlondon.co.uk/2025/01/31/the-silent-london-poll-of-2024-and-the-winners-are/

03/02/2025

CONGRATULATIONS Karen Pearlman on her irresistible new film BREAKING PLATES (2024)!!! It was our raucous privilege to collaborate with Pearlman, Richard James Allen I, & the Physical TV Co. on this project! Don't ask us, ask film critic Adrian Martin:

https://adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/reviews/b/breaking_plates.html

"Breaking plates, smashing frames, bursting out of constraints … at stake in all this boisterous anarchy is the topic that writer-director Karen Pearlman discusses: “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 Kaynakci, 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."

*Hey, ask us and Kino Lorber about our new traveling program BREAKING PLATES & SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY!!!!!

27/01/2025

Congratulations to our friends Alix Beeston & Stefan Solomon on winning the coveted Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Award for Best edited collection!!!!!

'Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film' is essential reading for every feminist, cinephile, and nasty woman evangelist! It's a key installment in the fabulous Feminist Media Histories book series, published by University of California Press.

The collection includes a chapter on Léontine (and catastrophic optimism!) by CFNW co-curator Maggie Hennefeld and brilliant contributions by our collaborators Karen Pearlman, Jane Gaines, Mathile Rouxel, and Katherine Fusco!

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/incomplete/paper

25/01/2025

We are absolutely delighted to announce that our new program, "BREAKING PLATES & SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY," will premiere in London this April at the 8th Kennington Bioscope Silent Film Weekend at The Cinema Museum!!! 🎞🎊🎶

http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/2025/8th-kennington-bioscope-silent-film-weekend/

The screening is headlined by Karen Pearlman's raucous, new, genre-bending, archival documentary BREAKING PLATES (2024), followed by 10 of your favorite dish-smashing shorts from the Cinema's First Nasty Women collection!!!

*Full program details below. Please reach out to us if you'd like to bring BREAKING PLATES & SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY to a movie screen near you! 🍽🌪🧨

Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy:

Breaking Plates (25 mins, 2024)
*BREAKING PLATES is a film by Karen Pearlman, produced by Richard James Allen I for The Physical TV Company.

Nervous Kitchen Maid (3 mins, 1907) `
Rosalie's Phonograph (4 mins, 1911)
Mary Jane’s Mishap (4 mins, 1903)
Zoé's Magic Umbrella (4 mins, 1913)
Léontine Pulls the Strings (7mins, 1910)
Hypnotizing the Hypnotist (7 mins, 1911)
Cunégonde femme cochère / Cunégonde the Coachwoman (6 mins, 1913)
The Boy Detective (5 mins, 1908)
Amour et Science / Love and Science (14 mins, 1912)
La grève des bonnes / The Maids’ Strike (7min, 1906)

Run time: 86 mins

20/01/2025

Wonderful review of Karen Pearlman's brilliant new film, BREAKING PLATES -- which integrates and reenacts footage of the dish-breaking mayhem that runs roughshod through Cinema's First Nasty Women!!! 🎞🎊❤️🍽

https://compulsivereader.com/2025/01/20/a-review-of-breaking-plates/

"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."

Film Reviews A review of Breaking Plates January 20, 2025 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 process...