Filmmaker/scholar Karen Pearlman (I Want To Make A Film About Women) sits down with SDFF Director and filmmaker Jane Winslow to discuss how film form and style figure into her cinematic elaboration of an obscured history in After The Facts (2018) and I Want To Make A Film About Women (2019). The conversation moves from broad issues like the elision of women from film history, to the use of speculative reenactment as a documentary method, to how dance has informed the filmmaker’s style, to her experience working with Russian film scholars and archivists, to an exhibition of the ways in which image selection can change the meaning of a scene. The discussion is punctuated by cinematic examples from the filmmaker’s own work.

Dr. Karen Pearlman, PhD is not only a prolific experimental filmmaker and documentarian, she is a noted film scholar, a senior lecturer at MacQuarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a director, with Dr Richard James Allen, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company, which creates dramas, documentaries and dance films informed by scholarly research into the history and future potential of the cinematic medium. Karen’s SDFF 2021 short I Want To Make A Film About Women is an excellent companion to this conversation. The film is about Esfir Shub, a female Soviet montage filmmaker left out of historic accounts of Russian Constructivist cinema, the movement credited with innovating montage, which so exclusively focalized male filmmakers/film theorists (Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov) that the editors, mostly women, who developed montage as an intellectual filmmaking practice have been almost completely forgotten. 

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