On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Dr Karen Pearlman.

Karen is Associate Professor at MacQuarie University in Sydney and an internationally-renowned scholar of creative practice, distributed cognition and feminist film histories. Her many projects as editor and/or director include, most recently, her short film Breaking Plates (2024) which has screened at various festivals this year, including Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Film historian Pamela Hutchinson has written of Breaking Plates that ‘it’s rare to see such joyful feminist revolution on screen, or such deep, loving engagement with silent film style. […]’ Karen’s books include the groundbreaking 2009 textbook Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing, which went into its third edition this year.

Pasquale spoke to Karen down the line from Sydney to discuss her other big release of 2025, a monograph on the American independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Like Karen, Clarke was a dancer, editor and filmmaker. She was active between the early 1950s and mid-80s, making several influential shorts as well as four daring, often controversial features on the African-American experience including The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1963), Portrait of Jason (1967) and Ornette in America (1985). Karen tells Pasquale about her approach to Clarke’s work and how it challenges and critiques traditional notions of film authorship. Clarke's work is placed in context, and the discussion also explores Clarke's links to her filmmaking contemporaries Jonas Mekas and Maya Deren.

Karen and Pasquale then discuss some of Clarke’s features, including a title which is now acknowledged as a landmark of LGBTQ+ cinema and which was once described by legendary Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman as ‘the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.’

Shirley Clarke (2025) by Karen Pearlman is published by Edinburgh University Press and is part of the series Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers (Series editors Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton).