When: January 23, 2026 7:30 pm
Where: Billy Wilder Theater
Admission: Free; no registration required.

Cinema’s First Nasty Women returns to the Billy Wilder Theater! Its name a riff on the feminist cri de cœur that arose during the 2016 presidential election, Cinema’s First Nasty Women is an ongoing, curated project to rediscover and revel in the anarchic spirit of women comedians who brought a rebellious energy to the early silent screen. Organized by an international team of film archivists and scholars, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, this new travelling program of restored titles from the project comes with a special twist. Archival collections can inspire new research which in turn helps grow new audiences, but they can also inspire new films. Based in Australia, with The Physical TV Company, filmmaker and author Karen Pearlman has built a feminist film practice that puts cinema’s past and present in dialogue in brilliantly constructed, canon-busting short film essays. For “Cinema’s First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy,” Pearlman drew on the project’s images and energy for her latest short, Breaking Plates. The Archive is thrilled to have Pearlman as our guest at the Billy Wilder Theater with a selection of her work along with the Los Angeles premiere of Breaking Plates and the silent slapstick female performers that inspired it.

Programmed by Paul Malcolm with Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen. Notes written by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm.

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Total runtime: 103 min.