PIKE PRESENTS: Occupation Native + Karen Pearlman Anthology

EDITOR'S ANTHOLOGY dir. Karen Pearlman - Aus | PG | 32 mins

An anthology of three award-winning short films by Karen Pearlman ASE, about women and cinema: Woman with an editing bench, After the facts and I want to make a film about women.

Woman with an Editing Bench (2016, 15 mins) celebrates the life and work of Elizaveta Svilova (1900-1975), the editor of Dziga Vertov's 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera. By referencing Svilova's own kinetically exhilarating montage style, this short film reveals her fierce tenacity and fleet thinking as she dodges the bureaucracy and sustains revolutionary filmmaking in spite of Stalin's oppression.

After the Facts (2018, 5 mins) looks at film editing techniques that revolutionised thinking and understanding of stories and asks: what happened to the stories of the women who did the editing? After the Facts uses the pioneering techniques of one such invisible woman and editor, Esfir Shub (1894-1959), credited with pioneering the remix film. It reveals the many different ways a story can be told depending on how archival footage is re-edited.

I want to make a film about women (2020, 12 mins) is a speculative love letter to Russian constructivist women. The new Soviet Union of the 1920s championed equality for women and great innovation in the creative arts. Until it didn't. Looking back at that time, history remembers the men who were celebrated. But women were there, too: influential, powerful and brilliant. This short film gazes into a creative communal kitchen and watches these women transform it into a workshop, then a stage set, then a film, all the while juggling noisy men and the wolves of history. It imagines what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression. Looking back at that time, history remembers the men who were celebrated. But women were there, too: influential, powerful and brilliant. This short film gazes into a creative communal kitchen and watches these women transform it into a workshop, then a stage set, then a film, all the while juggling noisy men and the wolves of history. It imagines what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression.