Zoje Stage, in
her recent guest post on Kid in the Front Row asked, 'Are you familiar
with Alice Guy-Blaché?' My answer was a resounding 'No...', which is a
real shame because Alice Guy-Blaché was seriously amazing, a force
majeure behind groundbreaking developments in the early film industry.
Why not knowing about Alice Guy-Blaché may not be entirely due to my own ignorance you can read here in Zoje's enlightening post.
Alice Guy,
the youngest of four daughters, was born in Paris in 1873 and grew up
in Switzerland, Chile and France. Her father, owner of a chain of book
stores, installed in her a love of literature and the arts.
After her
father's untimely death, Guy sought financial independence by making a
living as a short-hand writer before gaining employment as a sectretary
to French movie pioneer Leon Gaumont in 1894.
In
1896, Gaumont agreed to let Guy make her first film, provided she
didn't neglect her office duties. Guy made her directorial debut with
"La Fee aux Choux" ("The Cabbage Fairy"), a 60-second short film
believed (by many) to be the first ever fiction film. This achievement
makes Alice Guy-Blaché the first woman if not the first person to use
the camera for more than scientific purposes, turning it into a tool
for story telling. In her memoirs, published in 1976, Guy recalls, "If
the future development of motion pictures had been foreseen at this
time, I should never have obtained [Gaumont's] consent. My youth, my
inexperience, my sex, all conspired against me."
However,
with the Cabbage Fairy Guy-Blaché's achievements in film had only just
begun. After her first film had sold eighty copies, Gaumont was
impressed enough with the young film-maker to eventually make her head
of production of Gaumont films in 1897. Guy-Blaché became a prolific
film maker, making films across many genres, including westerns,
detective stories, biblical epics, melodramas and romantic comedies, and
ranging in length from short shorts to feature films. In the 19 years
in her creative role at Gaumont films and in the years after, Guy
directed, produced, wrote and/or oversaw an incredible number of films,
some hundreds, some even suggest around 1000. The exact number is still a
matter of some confusion.
Guy-Blaché's
technical expertise and inventiveness also rivals her male
contemporaries and journalists praised the 'polished' look of her films.
Using the Chronophone, a vertical-cut sound-on-disc device invented by
Gaumont in 1902, Guy-Blaché made over 100 sound films, long before
synchronised sound became standard in film-making. Guy-Blaché also used
special effects such as double exposure masking techniques or running
film backwards, and once exploded a ship off the Jersey Shore instead of
using a model. Guy-Blaché also had a special talent for drawing
sensitive performances from her actors - allegedly simply by hanging up
signs around the studio reading 'Be natural' or 'Act natural' but I'm
fairly certain that this is not the whole story.
In 1907,
shortly after her wedding to Herbert Blaché, Alice Guy-Blaché followed
her husband to the United States where he had been appointed production
manager for Gaumont films. Three years later the couple founded their
own studio, The Solax Company,
the largest studio in America until Hollywood. Alice Guy-Blaché was
artistic director and directed many of the studio's films herself. On
the back of its successful films the Solax Company expanded its
production facilities with their studio plant in Fort Lee, New Jersey quickly becoming the film capital of America. Alice Guy-Blaché became the first woman to own and run a studio plant!
Kristin M
Jones, writes Guy-Blaché's 'visual flair, use of real locations and
imaginative scripts for comedies and dramas defined the Gaumont style.
Before Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, she directed hilariously
deadpan slapstick comedies, such as "Le Matelas alcoolique" or "Le
Matelas épileptique" ("The Alcoholic Mattress" or "The Epileptic
Mattress," 1906), in which a drunk is sewn into bedding. And before
D.W. Griffith, she used expressive close-ups in the saucy "Madame a des
envies" ("Madame Has Cravings," 1906), about a pregnant woman who
steals and savors phallic treats.'
Above: Doris Kenyon as Millie Jessup, The Ocean Waif in The Ocean Waif (1916).
Unfortunately
Solax folded in 1914 with the decline of the film industry on the
American East Coast. The Blachés divorced and eventually also ended
their film and business partnership. Post-Solax Guy-Blaché 'brought
increasing emotional depth to her female characters,' particularly to
heronines the likes of Millie Jessup in the melodrama "The Ocean Waif"
(1916)'. Upon return to France in 1922 Guy-Blaché's career as a
film-maker came to an abrupt end. She failed to get any directing work
and instead worked as a writer for magazines, gave film lectures and
wrote novels from film scripts as well as children's books.
Alice
Guy-Blaché was a major contributor in shaping early film history. That
few have heard of her is probably partially due to the fact that most of
her work had gone missing for much part of the 20th century. Sadly,
when Guy-Blaché passed away in 1968, aged 98, she believed that almost
none of her films had survived. However, today about 130 of her films
have been rediscovered. Nonetheless, the loss of so many of Guy-Blaché's
films cannot explain satisfactorily why her male contemporaries, such
as D. W. Griffith, are so widely known but it has not been until very
recently that the world has taken some notice of her extraordinary
achievements.
It makes
me wonder how many amazing achievements by women across all fields of
human experience and human industry have been forgotten, brushed aside
and denied over the centuries and millennia past? Are we ever going to
be bothered to rewrite his-tory and make it our-story?
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Sources and further reading:
Teo Kermeliotis, CNN The Screening Room, Alice Guy-Blaché: Unsung heroine of early cinema
Kristin M Jones, The Wall Street Journal, A Ground Breaker in So Many Ways
Alison McMahan, Alice Guy-Blaché: The Lost Visionary of the Cinema (Continuum, New York and London, 2003)
The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché, (The Scarecrow Press Inc, 1996)
Watch Falling Leaves (1912) here
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