Alice Guy-Blaché

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Alice Guy-Blaché (1913)

Alice Guy-Blaché (born July 1, 1873 in Saint-Mandé , † March 24, 1968 in Mahwah , New Jersey ) was a pioneer of film and the world's first female film director . She shot her first film, La Fée aux Choux , in 1896, making her one of the first directors to ever create a fictional film. She later also became her own producer.

Life

Alice Guy-Blaché was born under the name Alice Guy to French parents who lived in Chile. Her father owned a chain of booksellers there. Her mother returned to Paris to give birth to her daughter. She spent the first years of her life with her grandmother in Switzerland until her mother took her to Chile, where she lived for two years. She was then sent to boarding school in France and was a teenager when her parents returned from Chile. Shortly afterwards, her father and brother died.

Alice Guy had been a shorthand typist since she was 17 . In 1894 she was hired by Léon Gaumont as a secretary at the Comptoir général de la Photographie . On March 22, 1895, she attended an in-house demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph . It was not until eight months later, on December 28, 1895, that the first public presentation of the cinematograph took place in Paris. Her employer soon went bankrupt, but the authorized signatory Gaumont founded the new company L. Gaumont et compagnie in July 1895 . There, Alice Guy suggested to her boss that he should make a film with a game plot himself. Gaumont accepted the proposal and so began Alice Guy's directing career, which would last over 25 years. During this time she made over 700 films as a screenwriter, director and producer.

Alice Guy headed production at Gaumont from 1897 to 1906 and was the first woman filmmaker in the world to systematically develop feature films. A studio was set up in the Belleville district of Paris . In 1906 she made her first feature film called La vie du Christ , a large-scale production for the time, in which over 300 extras took part. In the same year she also made the film La Fée Printemps , one of the first films in color. She also pioneered the production of sound recordings on phonograph drums that accompanied the films. She used double exposures and other effects.

In 1907 Alice Guy married the cameraman Herbert Blaché , who soon after took over the management of the Gaumont subsidiary in the USA. After their marriage, Alice Guy had initially given up her professional activity, but she resumed it after about three years. In 1910 she founded her own production company, Solax . Her husband took over the business management and she became artistic director. Over 300 films had been produced by 1914, and Alice Guy directed over 40. Adventure films have been particularly successful. The company was so successful that over 100,000 US dollars were invested in the production facilities in Fort Lee , New Jersey within two years . Fort Lee was quickly becoming one of the centers of film production in the United States .

She made a good reputation for herself in the United States with her productions. At this time, she began teaching film at Columbia University . In 1914, Solax was renamed Blaché Features , with Herbert Blaché taking over the presidency. But since he turned increasingly to art film, Alice Guy now mainly worked for Players & Plays, for which she continues to successfully direct adventure films such as The Adventurer (1917). After her husband ran the Blaché Features down, he moved to Hollywood . His wife later followed him to assist him. With the decline of production on the east coast under pressure from the Motion Picture Patents Company and the relocation of production to the west coast, the business cooperation with her husband also ended.

In 1918, she produced her first failure with The Great Adventure . Another flop followed in 1920 with Tarnished Reputations . She turned away from film and also divorced her husband in 1922. Alice Guy worked briefly for William Randolph Hearst 's International Film Service and then returned to France largely penniless with her two children. She lacked the starting capital for the production of new films, so she and her children got through with short stories, fairy tales and film reviews. In 1940 one of her daughters became a US diplomat and Alice Guy-Blaché was able to accompany her to her posts around the world.

The fact that their pioneering work was forgotten for a long time was also 'thanks' to male film historians, who simply ascribed their early films to male directors. In 1953 she was accepted into the Legion of Honor for her contributions to film . Her autobiography was not published until after her death.

Alice Guy-Blaché did not remarry. In 1964 she returned to the United States to live with one of her daughters. She died in 1968 in a nursing home in Mahwah , New Jersey .

In 1995, Marquise Lepage made a film Le Jardin oublié: La vie et l'œuvre d'Alice Guy-Blaché (The Lost Garden: The Life and Work of Alice Guy-Blaché).

Films (selection)

DVD publications

  • Scott Simmon (Ed.): More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931. National Film Preservation Foundation, San Francisco 2004. (Contains on DVD 3 Guy-Blachés Falling Leaves (1912) and a detailed text on the film in the accompanying book, pp. 121–126)
  • The Ocean Waif . Kino Lorber, New York 2008. (Also includes 49-17 (1917) by Ruth Ann Baldwin )
  • Gaumont - Le Cinéma premier, Volume 1: 1897-1913: Alice Guy - Louis Feuillade - Léonce Perret . Gaumont Vidéo, Neuilly-sur-Seine 2008. (Contains two DVDs with all the surviving films that Alice Guy directed for Gaumont between 1897–1907. The DVD box is also published in English as Gaumont Treasures (1897-1913) , Kino Lorber, New York 2009.)
  • Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology . Flicker Alley, Los Angeles 2017. (Contains Alice Guy-Blaché's films Les Chiens Savants (1902), Une Histoire Roulante (1906), La Barricade (1907), Falling Leaves (1912), Making an American Citizen (1912) and The Girl in the Armchair (1912).)

literature

  • Alice Guy: Autobiography of a Film Pioneer. 1873-1968. Tende, Münster 1981, ISBN 3-88633-900-9 (out of print).
  • Anthony Slide: Angels from Broadway or: The Entry of Women into Film History [OT: Early Women Directors . Barnes, South Brunswick 1977]. Tende, Münster 1982, ISBN 3-88633-900-9 , pp. 11-28.
  • Victor Bachy: Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968). La première femme cinéaste du monde. Institut Jean Vigo, Perpignan 1993, ISBN 2-906027-04-9 .
  • Amelie Hastie: "Circuits of Memory and History: The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blache". In: Jennifer M. Bean, Diane Negra (Eds.): A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Duke University Press, Durham 2002, ISBN 0-8223-3025-3 , pp. 29-59.
  • Alison McMahan: Alice Guy Blaché. Lost Visionary of the Cinema. Continuum, New York NY et al. 2002, ISBN 0-8264-5158-6 .
  • Joan Simon (Ed.): Alice Guy Blache: Cinema Pioneer. Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-15250-0 . (Published on the occasion of the exhibition Alice Guy Blache: Cinema Pioneer at the Whitney Museum of American Art , New York, November 6, 2009 to January 24, 2010).
  • Laurent Mannoni, Maurice Gianati (eds.): Alice Guy, Léon Gaumont et les débuts du film sonore. John Libbey Publishing, New Barnet 2012, ISBN 978-0-86196-708-7 .
  • Melody Bridges, Cheryl Robson (Eds.): Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema. Supernova Books, Twickenham 2016, ISBN 978-0-9566329-9-9 .

Movies

  • Katja Raganelli : Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) - homage to the world's first woman filmmaker . 1997 (59 min)

Web links

Commons : Alice Guy-Blaché  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ McMahan, Alison: The Most Famous Woman You've Never Heard Of. Alison McMahan on Alice Guy Blaché . In: Artforum International . tape 48 , no. 3 , 2009, p. 81-82 .
  2. ↑ Jason Daley, Documentary Explores Pioneering Woman Director Written Out of Film History , Smithsonian Magazine, August 22, 2019.
  3. ↑ Andrea Schweers : Alice Guy-Blaché . In: Fembio (as of 1997)
  4. ↑ Uta Berg-Ganschow: The first woman behind the camera. In: Zeit Online. October 16, 1981. Retrieved November 29, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Les Résultats du féminisme, 1906, Alice Guy , on YouTube, accessed November 26, 2016
  6. ↑ Madame a des envies, 1907, Alice Guy-Blaché , on YouTube, accessed November 26, 2016
  7. ↑ Gaumont Treasures (1897-1913) on Kino Lorber homepage, accessed on January 12, 2018
  8. ↑ Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology on DVD Beaver, accessed on January 12, 2018 (review with full details of the films included)
personal data
SURNAME Guy-Blaché, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Guy, Alice (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-American film pioneer, film director and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1968
Place of death Mahwah Township , New Jersey