Film Arts View features the works of awarded film artists inspiring filmmakers with innovations in film art & culture
Film Arts View features the works of awarded film artists inspiring filmmakers with innovations in film art & culture
Karen's latest film, I want to make a film about women, (the third film in her Soviet Women Filmmakers Trilogy) has won a slew of Australia’s top awards in record time and is eligible for an Academy Award nomination.
I want to make a film about women is a documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. It brings to life revolutionary women artists of the 1920s and speculates on what they said, did, and might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression.
Recently nominated for an AACTA Award, four ATOM Awards and numerous others, it has already won some of Australia’s most significant screen accolades in 2020:
• Best Documentary, St Kilda Film Festival (making it eligible for an Academy Award nomination)
• Best Direction of a Documentary Short Subject, Australian Directors' Guild (ADG) Awards
• Best Director, CinefestOz Short Film Awards
• Creative Achievement Award, Brisbane International Film Festival, Short Film Awards
• Special Mention, Dendy Awards for Australian Shorts, Sydney Film Festival, for 'an ambitious and masterful mix of forms'
Karen's Film Trilogy has achieved over 30 highly competitive national and international awards from peak industry bodies and film festivals, including 3 for best editing, 3 for best directing and 6 for best documentary. See Filmography and Awards below.
“It can’t be just a good film,”
says Pearlman of her approach to making cinematic projects ...
“It has to make a new contribution to knowledge.
So there’s been a whole lot of research questions that have led to Woman with an Editing Bench, and one is around distributed cognition. It says that you don’t just think in your brain, you think in your brain and your body and in the world, and that cognition is distributed and felt and intuitive, and it’s not just reasoning: it’s thought and action together. So I’ve been looking at film editing as an instance of distributed cognition.”
Realtime Magazine Interview with Lauren Carroll Harris
••• REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS •••
“Karen Pearlman, whose artistic career has spanned everything from dance to an indispensable textbook on film editing (Cutting Rhythms), completes an ambitious, lively trilogy on Russian women in the “Soviet montage” period with I want to make a film about women (in the Dendy Awards section). It recreates, in a suitably stylised way, the close-knit circle of creative women including montage master Esfir Shub – “cultural workers” who literally turned their kitchens into laboratories for inspiring, revolutionary art. Where [Allison] Chhorn [Plastic House] likes to linger and explore, Pearlman packs everything in tightly, kinetically; their films make an exceptional study in contrasting styles.”
Adrian Martin, “Sydney Film Festival 2020: Women On Top”, Screenhub, 2020
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Review of Karen Pearlman Film Trilogy: Rochford Street Review
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Review of Karen Pearlman Film Trilogy: Compulsive Reader
Editorial: Recognising Women's Work as Creative Work
Macquarie University, The Lighthouse:
'To Russian women, with love: trilogy celebrates forgotten filmmakers.'
Creative Editing: Svilova and Vertov's Distributed Cognition
Dr Karen Pearlman writes, directs and edits screen productions. She researches creative practice, cognition and feminist film histories.
Karen Pearlman is a director, with Richard James Allen, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company, based in Sydney, Australia. They create dramas, documentaries and dance films informed by scholarly research into the history and future potential of the cinematic medium. Their works have broadcast in Australia and around the world, screened at over 300 international film festivals, and received over 100 awards or nominations.
Karen's 2020 film, I want to make a film about women won Best Documentary at the 2020 St Kilda Film Festival, qualifying it for an Academy Award nomination. She was awarded both Best Director at the 2020 inaugural CinefestOz Short Film Awards and Best Direction of a Documentary Short Subject at the 2020 Australian Directors’ Guild (ADG) Awards. I want to make a film about women also received the Creative Achievement Award at the 2020 Brisbane International Film Festival Short Film Awards and a Special Mention at the 2020 Sydney Film Festival’s Dendy Awards for its ‘ambitious and masterful mix of forms'.
Karen’s 2018 documentary, After the Facts, was honoured with an ASE Award for Best Editing, after its screenings at the Sydney International Film Festival, the Adelaide International Film Festival, the Perth Revelation Film Festival and the Antenna Documentary Film Festival.
Her 2016 film, Woman with an Editing Bench, won the Australia’s ATOM Award for Best Short Fiction, the Australian Screen Editors' Guild (ASE) Award for Best Editing in a Short and six other film festival awards. ... the dancer from the dance a 2014 documentary made with the Sydney dance community, and directed and edited by Karen, won the Audience Choice Awards at the World of Women (WOW) Film Festival, and was a Finalist at the Australian Dance Awards for Outstanding Achievement for Dance on Screen and Finalist at Atom Awards for Best Arts Documentary.
Karen is a senior lecturer in Screen Production and Practice at Macquarie University, the 2020 Australian Top Research Institution in Film. She and her colleague Dr Iqbal Barkat won the 2019 Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for their collaborative teaching of screen production, and Karen is proud to supervise up and coming researchers in screen studies and creative practice. Before joining Macquarie, Karen held the post of Head of Screen Studies at AFTRS for 6 years. A leading theorist, speaker and writer on the art of film editing, she is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (now in its 2nd edition with Focal Press) and well-known around the world for her YouTube series The Science of Editing created with This Guy Edits.
Before taking up filmmaking, editing and film studies, Karen had a distinguished career as a professional dancer - performing on the Opera House stages of the world with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and other leading New York dance companies, as well as co-directing, with Richard James Allen, two other critically acclaimed dance companies, That Was Fast and Tasdance. She holds a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS, MAs in filmmaking from AFTRS and UTS, and BFA in Dance from NYC’s Tisch School of the Arts.
For more information, see the website of The Physical TV Company.
Woman with an Editing Bench
After the Facts
I want to make a film about women
Inspired by a true story, Woman with an Editing Bench celebrates Elizaveta Svilova, the editor of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece "Man with a Movie Camera". The film reveals her fierce tenacity and fleet thinking as she dodges the bureaucracy and sustains revolutionary filmmaking in spite of Stalin’s oppression.
In the early years of cinema, editors were usually women. This short documentary looks at how they wielded power, and how their work was made invisible.
I want to make a film about women is a documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. It brings to life revolutionary women artists of the 1920s and speculates on what they said, did, and might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression.
I want to make a film about women
Drawing from the past Karen Pearlman projects cinema into the future ... while dignifying the influences of early women film editors, Karen Pearlman, a PhD of Film Editing, redefines art in her groundbreaking Trilogy of Films.
In the final of the Trilogy, I want to make a film about women - a short Film about Russian constructivist female editors, Karen Pearlman, Writer / Director / Editor and Richard James Allen, Producer / Actor, create a genderless bias in their award-winning tale.
The characters appear as if in a 3D world of time, colour and sets, purposeful and unaware of the future audiences Karen will bring them.
The films’ leads and crew are remarkably in tune with Karens historical and futuristic filmmaking vision as the protagonists interact with each other, their editing equipment and the multi-dimensional sets created to showcase the story.
With a resounding musical score behind the colourful mise-en-scène, laced with archival footage, Karen Pearlman weaves and edits film magic.
Film Arts Review
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Woman with an Editing Bench
Dazzling, passionate, redefines art ... sound and music that dances and dives through finely crafted metaphors and historic artefacts as the drama unfolds to its deeply moving conclusion ... a masterpiece of history and modernism combined.
Film Arts Review
Karen Pearlman is a writer, director and editor and a two-time Australian Screen Editors Guild award winner. I want to make a film about women is the third in her trilogy of films about women filmmakers which have, between them, won a multitude of awards and screened at dozens of festivals. Karen is the author of ‘Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing’ and teaches filmmaking at Macquarie University. She and Richard James Allen direct The Physical TV Company.
WINNER: Best Documentary, St Kilda Film Festival 2020 (making it eligible for an Academy Award nomination)
FINALIST: Best Short Film • FINALIST: Craft Award • FINALIST: Best Original Score, St Kilda Film Festival 2020
WINNER: Best Director, CinefestOz Film Festival 2020
WINNER: Creative Achievement Award, Short Film Awards, BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Australia, 2020
WINNER: Special Mention, Dendy Awards for Live Action Australian Short 2020
SPECIAL MENTION: Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival 2020, for 'an ambitious and masterful mix of forms'
FINALIST: Best Live Action Short and FINALIST: Best Direction in a Short Film, Dendy Awards 2020
WINNER: Best Direction of a Documentary short Subject, Australian Directors' Guild (ADG) Awards 2020
FINALIST: Best Short Film, Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) awards 2020
WINNER: Production Grant, 2019 JIFF Short Film Fund, JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Melbourne & Sydney, 2019
WINNER: Best Director, FINALIST: Best Short Film, Inaugural CinefestOz Short Film Awards, CinefestOz Film Festival, 2020
WINNER: Best Direction of a Documentary Short Subject, AUSTRALIAN DIRECTORS' GUILD AWARDS, Sydney, Australia, 2020
WINNER: Silver Medal, Short Film (for Meg White), AUSTRALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHERS SOCIETY, NSW Branch, 2020
FINALIST: Best Music in a Short Film (for Caitlin Yeo), APRA AMCOS Screen Music Awards, Sydney, Australia, 2020
FINALIST: Best Short Film, AUSTRALIAN FILM INSTITUTE (AFI) | AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF CINEMA AND TELEVISION ARTS 2020 (AACTA) Sydney, Australia 2020
WINNER: Best Documentary - History and WINNER: Best Docudrama, ATOM AWARDS, Melbourne, Australia, 2020
FINALIST: Best Documentary - Short Form (30 minutes or less) - ATOM AWARDS, Melbourne, Australia, 2020
FINALIST: Best Documentary - Biography - ATOM AWARDS, Melbourne, Australia, 2020
WINNER: Best Short: Pride Parade, Section: Shorts Spotlight SCAD SAVANNAH FESTIVAL, Savannah, Georgia, USA, 2020
OFFICIAL SELECTION: VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, British Columbia, Canada, 2020
WINNER: Best Doco Short, SYDNEY WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Sydney, Australia, 2020
FINALIST: Best Director, Best FINALIST: Australian Film, FINALIST: Best Actress, SYDNEY WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2020
WINNER: ‘Best Shorts of 2020’ at Bunbury Fringe 2020
WINNER: Jury’s Citation Award, THOMAS EDISON BLACK MARIA FILM FESTIVAL, 2021
WINNER: Best Director, WIFT V-FEST Online Women’s Film Festival, Brisbane, Australia 2021
FINALIST: Best Documentary, FINALIST: Best Editor, WIFT V-FEST Online Women’s Film Festival, Brisbane, Australia 2021
WINNER: Special Jury Mention – Short, SEBASTOPOL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL, California, USA 2021
WINNER: Honorable Mention, EXPERIMENTAL FILM FORUM, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2021
WINNER: Award of Excellence: Special Mention ~ Documentary Short, THE IMPACT DOC AWARDS, California, USA, 2021
FINALIST: Best Production for a Short Film (Valentina Iastrebova), Best Costume Design for a Short Film or Music Video (Valentina Serebrennikova), AUSTRALIAN PRODUCTION DESIGN GUILD AWARDS (APDG Awards)
WINNER: Best Short Non-Fiction Film Award, MULTICULTURAL FILM FESTIVAL, Melbourne Australia, 2021
WINNER: Best Director, Best Production, First Women Film Festival, Tabriz, Islamic Republic of Iran, 2022
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WINNER Best Editing, Open Content, Australian Screen Editors Guild (ASE) Ellie Awards 2018
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WINNER Best Short Fiction, SAE ATOM Awards 2016
WINNER Best Editing in a Drama - Short Film, Australian Screen Editors Guild (ASE) Ellie 2016
WINNER Best Female Actress, Auckland International Film Festival 2016
WINNER Best Music Score, Auckland International Film Festival 2016
WINNER Silver REMI Award, Historical Short Productions Worldfest Houston International Film Festival 2017
WINNER Special Jury Prize for Best Short Film, Reel Sydney Festival of World Cinema 2017
WINNER Grand Jury Awards, Best Short, Honorable Mention Dances with Films 2017
WINNER Best Editing, Scruffy City Film & Music Festival 2017
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WINNER Audience Choice Awards, WOW (World of Women) Film Festival 2014
FINALIST Best Documentary - Arts, IP Awareness ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Awards 2014
FINALIST Best Music, Documentary, APRA AMCOS AGSC (Australian Guild of Screen Composers) Screen Music Awards 2014
FINALIST Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film / New Media, Australian Dance Awards 2014 for 'a finely structured documentary exploring the motivations and spirit of dance and dancers, giving an inspiring and intimate look into the creativity, passion and processes of dancers'.
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For more information visit www.karenpearlman.net or see the website of The Physical TV Company.
Co-Artistic Directors: Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman.
The Physical TV Company (Artistic Directors: Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman) is Australia's premier company for the production and distribution of screen dance, dance film, video dance or dance on camera...we make "stories told by the body". Our award-winning shorts and feature films combine the finest filmmakers, crews and production values with dance, dancers and ideas about making moving pictures that move. Thought-provoking, engaging and rich in rhythms and images, Physical TV's award-winning physical films regularly screen nationally and internationally at Festivals, on TV and online. More recently Physical TV is bringing its kinetic imagination into the movement of story through drama, documentary and transmedia projects.
Richard and Karen have worked internationally as film and video producers and artistic directors of dance companies. They have created a body of dance on screen work which has been shown at over 300 Dancefilm and Film Festivals and other screenings around the world, and been produced in collaboration with and/or broadcast in Australia on ABC TV, SBS TV, and Southern Cross Television, and overseas on TV Slovenia, KMTV, China, and MNN, USA. These productions have won many awards, nominations and commendations for themselves and their collaborators. For more information, or to order Physical TV Streaming Links and Books, please visit: www.physicaltv.com.au
Richard James Allen is a director, with Karen Pearlman, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company. Based in Sydney, Australia, they create documentaries, dramas and dance films informed by scholarly research into the history and the future potential of the cinematic medium. An AACTA nominated, Dendy, St Kilda, Brisbane and five-time ATOM Award winning producer, Richard’s films have been commissioned or purchased for multiple broadcasts by ABC and SBS-TV, and been picked up for broadcast in China, Europe and on cable TV in the USA. His productions have travelled to over 300 film festivals on six continents, including all of the most selective and prestigious dance film festivals in the world. They have garnered well over 100 awards or nominations, many have attracted grant funding or support through government or philanthropic arts funding bodies, and a number have been added to the collections of 10 major film archives around the world.
Recent films Richard has produced include: Karen Pearlman’s acclaimed Soviet Women Filmmakers Trilogy (Woman with an Editing Bench, After the Facts, and I want to make a film about women), winner of over thirty awards; Parish Malfitano’s critically lauded psychological thriller Bloodshot Heart, winner of several awards and nominated for Best Fiction Feature Film at the ATOM Awards; and Samuel Lucas Allen’s CinefestOz Best Director-nominated short, After Saturn.
In addition to his creativity as a producer, director, writer, actor and dancer, Richard is an acclaimed Australian poet. His first novel, More Lies was published in 2021; his eleventh book of poetry, Text Messages from the Universe, is forthcoming in 2023. He also has an extensive track record of creating critically lauded works for the stage and, together with Karen Pearlman, edited a landmark national anthology of writing for performance for Currency Press.
Richard won the Chancellor’s Award for Most Outstanding PhD Thesis for his doctorate at the University of Technology, Sydney, and graduated with First Class Honours for his B.A. at Sydney University. He has taught for multiple tertiary institutions, including AFTRS, NIDA, SFS, ACPE, AMPA, CAPA, WSU. For more information, please see the website of The Physical TV Company: http://physicaltv.com.au
