Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

by Alison McMahan

Alice Guy BlachT (1873-1968), the world's first woman filmmaker, was one of the key figures in the development of narrative film. From 1896 to 1920 she directed 400 films (including over 100 synchronized sound films), produced hundreds more, and was the first--and so far the only--woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). However, her role in film history was completely forgotten until her own memoirs were published in 1976. This new book tells her life story and fills in many gaps left by the memoirs. Guy BlachT's life and career mirrored momentous changes in the film industry, and the long time-span and sheer volume of her output makes her films a fertile territory for the application of new theories of cinema history, the development of film narrative, and feminist film theory. The book provides a close analysis of the one hundred Guy BlachT films that survive, and in the process rewrites early cinema history.

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

408 pages, Paperback

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