Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

by Alison McMahan

‘The time has arrived, so it would seem, when woman must take her place beside man in the majority of arts and professions in the business world. In women of the caliber of Madame Alice Blaché it has also been demonstrated that there is a possibility of their doing so without being shorn of that most desirable of womanly qualities, femininity.’ The Moving Picture News, 1912 ‘It has long been a source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful opportunities offered to them by the motion-picture art to make their way to fame and fortune as producers of photodramas. Of all the arts there is probably none in which they can make such a splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman than to a man and so necessary to its perfection.’ Alice Guy Blaché, 1914 Over a hundred years after she started making films (which was considerably earlier than D.W. Griffith, Mabel Normand, and Lillian Gish began their careers), the life and work of Alice Guy Blaché is still shrouded in myth and controversy. Only a fraction (111) of the approximately one thousand films that she directed still exist, and almost half of these have been found very recently. The films are spread out in archives all over the world. Not all of them are available for viewing, even to scholars, and many of them are in desperate need of conservation and preservation. It is widely agreed that she was the first woman filmmaker but there is considerable debate as to whether she made the first ever fiction film. She played a key role in early sound film production, and yet this part of her career is almost always ignored. She is, to this day, the only woman ever to have owned and run her own film studio. And yet she made her final film in 1920, at the age of 47, and died in New Jersey in 1968 – unacknowledged, unheralded, almost totally forgotten. Ten years of painstaking research has enabled Alison McMahan to piece together the career of this extraordinary woman. What results is the first full-length treatment of Alice Guy Blaché’s work, the debunking of several long-standing myths about her and, ultimately, the emergence of a feminist figurehead of the filmmaking industry.

Genres: Film, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Feminism, Womens, Art

Hardcover

First published October 20, 2003

About the author

Alison McMahan is an award-winning screenwriter and author. Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema (Bloomsbury 2002), won two awards, was translated into Spanish, adapted into a play, and was adapted into the documentary Be Natural (2018).

McMahan has trudged through the jungles of Honduras and Cambodia, through the favelas of Brazil and from race tracks to drag strips in the U.S. in search of footage for her documentaries. Her first novel, The Saffron Crocus, a historical YA mystery, was released by Black Opal Books December 2014. She has stories in anthologies published by Wild Rose Press, LevelBest Books, Down & Out Books, and HarperCollins. FollowAlison on Facebook.

Reviews

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why was Guy so completely forgotten?" The man she worked for in France, Leon Gaumont, was an inventor and valued invention exclusively. The films Guy directed were used to sell equipment. Documentation attributing direction is scarce before 1905. Film histories written from the 1920s through the 70s would not, of course, catalog her accomplishments. Until 1912 there was no copyright protection for film scripts.

Guy-Blache was integral in the birth of film in France, as well as the development of cinematic narrative. She developed location shooting, she pioneered a studio system years before the same was done by Ince in the U.S. She trained other directors who would go on to earn fame, as well as set designers who are in the history of film. She trained her husband who directed Buster Keaton, which made Keaton a star. She made over 100 synchronized sound films when synchronized sound was still a misty vision.

This book begins the discussion, and perhaps will encourage the work to find and document the work of other women artists.

McMahan's work in piecing together a filmography of the extant films of Alice Guy Blache is exemplary, and hopefully a bellwether for further study.

[Hallie]

read for eflux

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Guy Blache was a major filmmaker, and movie studio boss. French of course and sort of the secret history of the importance of women in film aesthetics and its history. An amazing talent and this biography is a good introduction to the world of French filmmaking in the early teens.

[Marva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unseen hero!

Very encouraging to read about how much Alice Guy Blaché achieved in her lifetime, although a shame about the lack of recognition. Written well, but perhaps more time was spent explaining film theories than was necessary for the purposes of this book